New System for Aircraft

There has been a lot of discussion about aircraft on this board, and I think the biggest issue we are having is that none of us really like the past implementations of aircraft. Even strong players who think they are fair and balanced would probably agree they are not as strategically interesting or fun to play with as land units, which are restricted by terrain and for which maneuver is important.

Aircraft in 3D

I have no idea if this is feasible, or even if this is a good idea. But let's consider for a moment the consequences of graduating aircraft to movement in true three-dimensional space. Most RTS games have aircraft floating in a specified plane at a fixed height above the surface, and compare distances between air units and ground units directly, as if they were in the same plane.

If we treat air units as occupying a location in three-dimensional space, this distance calculation becomes more complicated. An air unit that is 5000m up in the sky now requires at least a range of 5000m for a unit to target it, provided the shooter is standing directly beneath the plane. If the plane flies away from the shooter, the distance increases with the hypotenuse of the altitude and the distance to the point on the ground beneath the plane.

Due to this fact, we could actually allow many types of units to fire at aircraft. Their major limitation would be that they will essentially never get the chance because their range is not great enough to reach planes at their normal cruising altitude. But a hovering, low-flying helicopter is fair game for a tank cannon that would otherwise never be able to hit a plane.

Non-Collision

If planes are flying in 3-space, there is suddenly a lot more room for them to move than in a mere plane. This makes it easier to force non-collision. Where there might not be enough room in a flat plane, in 3-space there is a vertical dimension as well.

So, each plane reserves a spherical region around itself where friendly planes cannot fly. Enemy planes entering this sphere will crash, likely destroying both craft, or at least inflicting serious damage. Which is pretty awesome, and might even be strategically significant, as a pair of large, dense air forces engaging in an all-out brawl, charging towards one another at speed, are going to almost immediately suffer massive casualties from collisions. Which means your expensive air superiority fighters with their big engines, missiles, and avionics systems are suddenly worth just about as much as my dirt-cheap interceptors once the armadas get huge.

Due to this pathing limitation, planes do not actually scale perfectly as their numbers increase. Much like land units, if there are too many combatants, the effectiveness of some of them will drop. Combined with splash damage anti-air sources, and each plane being fragile with high burst damage, this will encourage players to use planes carefully, and in controlled groups rather than massive blobs. If it only takes six fighter-bombers to fire a dozen missiles to take out that fusion, why send your entire air force at once? You have other targets to hit, air patrols to maintain, etc. etc. And if you throw 200 planes at a target, they will get in each others' way- not to mention you are risking all of them at once.

Radar

The one-size-fits-all radar makes intel too simplistic, but that's another post. In short, I am of the opinion that conventional radar should be used to detect air units only, and more expensive systems with less range are needed to detect land units and buildings in the same reliable and convenient manner.

Anyway, if aircraft operate in 3-space, there is an interesting possibility regarding flying "under the radar." Radar is ineffective at low altitudes as its reflection off the ground and the signal-rich surface makes "chop" which makes it impossible to discern a specific signature. So let's institute a "radar altitude" below which radar does not detect planes.

However flying low has negative side effects. The most important is that you cannot fly at high speed. Slow aircraft don't really care about this limitation, but supersonic fighters cannot safely exercise their engines without a tiny bit of turbulence causing them to instantly crash.

Also significant, when flying at low altitude, you are in very close proximity to any enemy anti-air you might happen to fly past, making you a very easy target.

Altitude & Anti-Air

Now we get into the cool stuff- what are the consequences of adopting this, admittedly more complex system for aircraft. Firstly, air units become considerably more realistic. But we don't care about realism unless it enhances gameplay. Fortunately in this case, realism greatly enhances gameplay. Where "stacking" aircraft in a flat plane is bizarre, stacking them vertically in 3D space is perfectly legitimate, if a bit unusual.

Another realistic-but-also-interesting mechanic is the manner in which air units interact with anti-air. Anti-air weapons now have altitude limits due to their limited range, meaning it is entirely possible to fly completely over short-range anti-air, provided your planes can manage to reach that height. Spy planes (a la SR-71 "Blackbird"), high altitude strategic bombers, and other aircraft might leverage this to great effect. Conversely, craft like helicopters, only capable of quite low altitude flight, lack this ability. It is important to note that aircraft have limited range as well- a missile will be able to hit a ground target further away if the aircraft fires from a lower altitude. Bombs would be the exception to this- they can be dropped from any altitude, although they become extremely inaccurate if dropped from a great height. Smart bombs would be an expensive way to get accuracy at altitude.

In addition to having a maximum height, anti-air's effective maximum range actually depends on the distance to the target. Higher altitude effectively reduces the maximum range of enemy ground anti-air, even if you can't exceed it wholesale and render yourself immune. Naturally, fighters solve this range problem by flying. Drones or cheap interceptors might be incapable of sufficiently high altitude flight, or of great enough speed to catch some types of planes, however.

Conclusion

Three dimensional space is complicated to implement, and has user interface difficulties because screens are flat. Still, with a little bit of UI sauce to indicate desired cruising altitude, and a vertical marker indicating how far above/below that altitude a plane or group of planes is presently, we can get most of the benefits with only a marginal increase in player management. We don't have to go full Homeworld for this to work, since a planet has a reference frame we can use to simplify it; the ground.

It's an idea that may be infeasible, and maybe someone can come up with a serious negative gameplay consequence that would disqualify it. However, I am reasonably sure it is a large improvement over the conventional RTS system of having aircraft occupy a flat plane without collision.

I like the concept! But I can see it becoming quite hard to manage. Do you have any solutions to the UI issues?

Most of us agree that aircraft need some kind of nerf from previous incarnations of TA. Your suggestion is interesting, but it seems more complicated than other proposed ones. Do you think these others may be sufficient?

-Fixing them to a certain range from airbases and carriers
-Making their usefulness vary with atmospheric density and gravity
-Giving AA hefty splash damage

This could be done by means of a fuel system like in SupCom.

This would only add extra unnecessary complexity. I want my air units to be equally effective, whether I'm fighting on earth or on mars.
I would like to have planets where air units are simply unavailable due to <insert reason>.

I would like to see the size of your airforce limited by the amount of floorspace you can maintain as airbases. The default position for your aircraft could be at their home airbase which would be the only place they could refuel. You would be prevented from building more planes than your ground infratructure could support.

This system would prevent spamming ASFs (or any air unit)

Bombing raids would be planned sorties with a range limited by the amount of fuel to get them there and back. I guess you could extend the range by sacrificing the bombers and building more. The system would allow to replace lost aircraft until you reached the limit imposed by the floor space you have turned into airfields.

This would also mean the excellent prospect of having a scramble button to get your fighters into the air asap when an incoming bombing raid is detected!

I believe this to be a horrible idea. I do not want to fill my base with airfields to be able to support an airforce. Also, in the future aircraft should be able to land on any airfield they can reach... Aircraft also already have the ability to be in the air a lot more than they have to be on the ground, making the "X aircraft per airfield" mostly invalid. It would still make sense, but one airfield would be capable of supporting 100s of aircraft. (realistically speaking)

Easy solution:

Exactly the same as TA, but with better anti-air weapons. More effective tracking and damage. I recall some mods adding homing missile systems that made for extremely effective anti-air, but were expensive to build and easy to destroy.

The problem was generally just being able to hit the units, and do enough damage to be effective. If you could just spray the air with explosions, you'd damage enough things to halt the attack.

I liked having my air units flying all the time without consequence, but I should be punished for attacking an anti-air position without non-air support.

I think air should only be used for raid/surprise/opportunity attacks. They shouldn't be able to win the war.

Better anti-air should accomplish this without adding any outrageous restrictions or features.

Which aircraft spend longer in the air than on the ground? Really, in a war setting? Doesn't sound right to me.

I think people are unhappy with how spamming air works in a lot of similar RTSs and a system like this would prevent that. IRL planes spend most of their time on the floor and they participate in sorties of limited duration.

Sure have them refuel at other airfields you own, not just their home, and allow extra planes to be built if you think you can manage always having 50% in the air at any time, but I think the idea still has merit. IMO realistic style limitations like this can work well.

I like the suggestions so far except limited planes per airfield. I think one airfield should support unlimited planes. That's enough of a strategic bottleneck without the micro headaches of limited planes. You could still build more if you want redundancy in case it gets destroyed. And I agree air units in flight should auto-rebase to any airfield within range if their current one is destroyed.

I strongly support adding fuel, ammunition, and transport capacity limitations for aircraft, in addition to the sketch idea of having planes fly in 3D space.

The aircraft logistics system, and the desired gameplay between air and anti air, are both relevant but distinct systems from a revision of the conventional RTS trope of using a flat plane where aircraft positions are represented similarly to land units, but higher up.

Regarding limited capacity- this wouldn't be as big a problem a some posters seem to think. If an aircraft carrier can hold 100 planes, you can still build thousands of planes if you want. They may spend a lot of time parked near the factory which built them because you can't maintain them in active operations. But if you have them on hand you can add carriers and immediately stock them, or you can draw from your reserves to replace casualties.

If we wanted to be more restrictive than this, we could require that many types of planes only land on designated areas, such as requiring a runway. We then draw a distinction between runways and hangars. Runways are used to take off, or land. Adding runways thus increases the speed at which you can get a large air force airborne, or land it. Adding more hangars increases the storage capacity of planes. There is nothing stopping you from having lots of hangars and one runway, but the result will be it would take a very long time to get all those planes flying, or to fill up all your hangars with planes that are currently airborne. Alternately, we could have some sort of lore-alternate system that functions in a similar capacity, such as using an accelerator of some kind to launch planes at high speed (Battlestar Galactica style accelerator perhaps?), or a capture system to let them land quickly and easily.

I think that the aircraft should be VTOLs and not limited to air fields. Fuel and ammo seems a fine idea, but I think that there should be easy and simple mobile refueling, repair, and rearmament options like construction units or engineers (maybe even flying ones), as well as aircraft factories. Air Repair/Replenishment Pads would simply do the job faster. An Aircraft carrier could serve as a mobile factory, a repair/replenishment pad, radar, and energy source (with some type of fusion reactor or something).

Great idea,

on all the comments, advanced technology, don't you think they kind of increased efficiency some bit.
Also, if there should refueling, flying refuel planes (would like to see the explosion), fly-by battery recharge, space refueling for certain airships or huge flying structures with energy generators.
(this would introduce a versatile though weak base for the third choice of play style. (land+naval: strong straightforward, water (submerged): stealth and spread), maybe something for its own topic.)

however, if you are not playing on a flat field, the hypotenuse of the altitude will give some funny things, like shooting through the planet with lasers or when the automated targeting gets the ETA or collision path wrong (because of insufficient information or deviation) and lands "somewhere" on the planet, had my commander taken out by one of my own lost bullets once -_-". And i just took down 15 nukes...

still great idea, an altitude slider.

Why not:
- Improve anti-air tracking
- Improve anti-air damage

Surface units should be the focus. Air should really only exist to complement surface, not supplement it. By buffing anti-air, you make it less desirable, but if players become so used to not using air that they fail to account for it, air attacks should still be able to deal significant damage.

All these systems that try to limit the usability of aircraft is just creating issues. A simple buff to anti-air is all that's needed.

Any reasons why this wouldn't work, or is this just a matter of 'new game, new design'...?

~

(More Reasoning)

Land units are limited to land, thus should dominate the land. Naval are restricted to water, and thus dominate that. Air share the middle ground, thus should dominate neither. Instead of introducing some new mechanics that may fail miserably, why not stick with what has worked in the past.

It wouldn't make sense to nerf air units, since they'd become useless. Their main advantage was that there wasn't really a good counter to them. They were simply more powerful because they survived too long. Improving anti-air should solve this. It still lets air be very effective when there is no anti-air, which many of these other 'solutions' seem to be missing.

There is a world of difference between wanting to change the mechanics of air units to remove pathological gameplay, and wanting to buff/nerf them.

Air units are not overpowered in TA. They do not obviate land units, nor is "always go air" a gamplay norm. The same can be said for SupCom, and SupCom 2. They are not overpowered. It could be argued that shifting the gameplay in favor of ground war makes the game more interesting. Land units are slower, increasing the effective size of the map, and are restricted by terrain, making maneuver more important. I would agree, that is more interesting. But it is not a balance issue.

I want to make air units more interesting by introducing limitations. If air units have unlimited ammo and fuel, and fly across the entire map in a few seconds then the whole map is this tiny slugfest where numbers decide the battle. It's not imbalanced, it's just uninteresting.

Just buffing anti-air is a band-aid approach to an existing system, such as that implemented in SupCom 2. And for that game, I would wholeheartedly agree it would be much improved by radically buffing anti-air. But for a brand-new game, where unit stats, and even the core mechanics of the game, are not yet determined, having a balance discussion is sort of pointless.

No, they don't. There were individual units that were overpowered in previous games (hawks in TA, restorers in original supcom). The fix is to avoid overpowered individual units, not to nerf an entire theatre of operations. FA got aircraft about right. Powerful if used well, easily countered if you saw it coming, and most effective when used in combined arms operations.

If you sit in your base playing simcity till 150 strategic bombers snipe your ACU then you deserve to lose! The same way you deserve to lose if you sit in your base playing simcity till a Krogoth shows up and levels everything. Or a nuke hits. Or 200 cans wander in. Or a Mavor shells your base to ruins.

Massive numbers of any unit will always be devastating if you're unprepared or vastly outclassed economically. And that's exactly as it should be.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the increase AA damage boat, but if instead you reduce aircraft hitpoints it allows for you to maintain the higher hitpoint levels for super tough planes, like heavy gunships (bombers and such might not be this tough) and such that are mass inefficient to create but have land unit level hitpoints and near land unit speed. sure this could be achieved by just giving the heavier air units even more hitpoints but then things start to loose focus between the health of one unit type and the other (2k HP planes being as tough as 500hp land units due to damage changes).

This also means that if all guns can target everything planes are treated as fragile as they would be when getting hit by a tank shell (the balance issue of tanks significant damage to planes is mostly handled by tracking ability).

A thought from a separate thread about gas planets, I personally believe airfields themselves should be airborne. I believe they will still be fixed position but I also feel this would be important for the eventual inclusion of water/gas planets. Aircraft could still use these floating bases as a home, they'd just fly slowly/hover near them (or land on them, whatever the consensus eventually becomes) but it would both be pretty cool and beneficial for the eventual inclusion of worlds that do not have physical ground that airfields be airborne.

Aircraft are not going to be usable in gas giants. You are going to fight in orbit around the Jovian planet, I presume. Those types of planets are incredibly hostile environments, to say nothing of the extreme gravity.

I think you want orbital platforms that can launch smaller craft, which is awesome. They could be in orbit around a gas giant, no problem.

And you have source I suppose?

It's an idea I'd love to see, and I see no reason it would be impossible. And your gravity argument isn't actually true, Gravity of gas planets CAN be extremely high, at a certain altitude within it's atmosphere. Just like earth, the higher up you are the less gravity. (http://www.universetoday.com/21639/gravity-on-neptune/) Since I'd assume we'd be operating fairly high up to gather gases, you could easily assume where they are is not to much greater/less than a standard celestial body.

Think along the lines of "cloud city" from star wars as 1 possible scenario, they harvest the gas from large hovering platforms and fly in between cities. That would be a cool way to incorporate gas planet warfare.

It's not so much an increase in AA damage, it's make it more effective. Part (or most) of the problem with aircraft was that even dedicated defenses against them weren't able to reliably hit them.

Make it more effective, and the deterrent will be there to prevent air from dominating the game.

I don't have a source for saying aircraft won't work explicitly, but when they discussed gas giants they said they will have "only orbital" gameplay about them. Nothing is set in stone, though.

I can definitely imagine having floating bases in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant with air wars between them. This could be quite interesting if they are able to move slowly, also.

Flying carriers for regular planets have the potential to be awesome, provided they are priced to match the obvious logistical advantages of using such an asset. We don't want to obsolete naval units by including huge, powerful airship vessels, although that idea is pretty damn awesome.