Planetary Assaults and Interstellar Transportation

Good add on point, I hadn't even forgot about the time aspect! xD

Mike

I'm going to have to vote no on this for the simple reason that I think interplanetary troop cannons (as shown in the concept video) are a hell of a lot more AWESOME!

And really think about it. We're talking about robots, not people. They don't eat, they don't drink, they don't get bored, and perhaps most importantly, they don't die from exposure to the cold vacuum of space.

With all that in mind, it seems to me like it would be cheaper and easier to just chuck them across the distance with cannons and use whatever is necessary to decelerate them properly once they arrive. It's like a halo drop, only considerably more AWESOME! They're robots not people, They don't need your padded leather seats. They don't fly first class. They get there the cheapest and easiest way possible.

Why would they ever bother to build interplanetary troop transports?

Oh yeah, very solid and sophisticated point you made there. [/sarcasm] I for my part want to discuss this seriously, with considerations towards the gameplay. When I brought up the awesome point it was meant humorously.

Edit: Did you consider planet movement btw... I don't think so. Shooting units from a moon to a planet is a little different than doing so interplanetaryly...


@ giantsnark:
Time also elapses when you send your units across the surface of a planet... so this is not necessarily a valid point (assuming it was meant as an arguent against transport ships...) I would rather say, not having to spend time to travel between planets would be kind of an unfair advantage for the attacker, as it is not normal for an attacker to not have the disadvantage of needing time to bring his stuff to the front.

Yes it is cool, but it isn't universally applicable, using a unit cannon to shoot out of a planet's gravity well is pretty ridiculous to me.

I see the unit cannon as an efficient, but short ranged, deployment tool, if you're sending down support onto your planet from your moon(as seen in the vid) or if you've engine-d a Moon/Asteroid into orbit around an enemy planet then the Unit Cannons would be the most efficient way to get a large force down onto a planet, especially if you load them externally(In SupCom2 I think the units had to be build by the Unit cannon in order to fire them) but that only works "downhill" as it were.

In order to get off a planet, get from a moon a planet(that it's not orbiting) or get to and/or from an asteroid you need a transport of some kind.

Besides, using just unit cannons for unit transportation is boring and one dimensional.

Mike

In that case...

One day I hope to see a mod/easter egg that turns all planet killing asteroids into Nokia phones once they are sent in motion

And I disagree. Once you are in space in free flight, there is no real difference between a short and a long trip. Now yes, for longer trips you may want more acceleration to make things faster, but that doesn't need to be a transport. A rocket does this job just fine too.

The whole point to me is that machines don't fly first class. They fly as cheaply and easily as possible. And that pretty much means doing away with the transport entirely and using as little as possible to get the job done.

As I said, range is irrelevant. You need enough thrust to get into orbit and moving in a direction, and you need enough thrust to decelerate once you arrive. Thrust in transit is only useful for faster trip times.

It does take more power to get off the planet yes. Rockets are a simple solution here.

Now, I have to admit, you maybe do have a point here. But if we do have multiple ways to do things here, they each need to have a clear reason to exist. If one just just another way to do things, what will happen is people will study and analyze their choices, and end up realizing that one is simply better than another, and chuck one of your choices into the trashcan.

If there are multiple choices, they need to be different enough to all be useful.

Yes it's realistic that once in space the difference between long and short trips is negligible, but I think is a prime example of a case when gameplay should trump realism because as you admitted, the one dimensional-ness isn't all that attractive long term.

Also you should assume that 'transports' means the units get in-flight meals and reclining seats, a moon-Asteroid transort could be nothing more than engines and the AI with a bunch of racks to attach units too, similar to how they were in SupCom. A dropship would need a bit more to it in order to survive re-entry and make it back out.

A unit cannon is also one dimensional in the fact that it can only send units somewhere, it' can't do a thing about bringing them back, and this becomes even more awkward when you consider farther trips, like if you send units to an enemy planet on;y to realize on landing they won't be able to accomplish anything you're either committed to righting those units off or sending more in the hopes that with the extra units they'll be able to accomplish something, with a transport/dropship there could be the option of pulling out and saving those units.

Mike

LOL! That'd be great.

On to the topic, this would be a much better solution to the teleportation, which is kind of cool, but having exactly what lambaster described would be AWESOME! Which is what the game is going for right?

While I know Uber don't want any kind of deep space or star wars style spaceship combat. I do feel the transport carriers would require a compliment of fighters and bombers, and/or maybe some defensive weapons that can fire on the orbital defences not the planet its self. Reason for this is that if a player did manage to build a huge amount of defences on a planet that is worth taking by force, say it's the only metal planet in system, which given the description uber has given them. They will likely be a huge strategic asset. So will you need some way to bypass those orbital defences, and an excuse for more awesome.

While the orbital cannons are good from a moon, or near by asteroid, to travel from one planet to another it would take an extremely long time, and if there is even a slight aim deviation with gravity not taken into account (which given the flight path of the asteroid it is) the bots could end up in a gas giant, or the star(s). At this point you would require the cannon to be aligned in just the right way depending on where you built it. Which would also take much longer. Not great for gameplay tbh.
While it is cool to fire a load of tanks from one planet to another, to build enough cannons to launch a full scale invasion would be expensive, and while you could likely fire a constant stream of units, until your out of alignment. You would still have to deal with the orbital defences, or even AA defences, and as previously said, due to the time I'd take, the defender could build up some pretty decent deffences that could make your attempted assualt a waste of time and resources.

What I'm saying is, we could have the tank cannons AND the transport carriers. That'd be awesome. The cannons alone won't be able to do much, but if they are reinforcing or being reinforced by a transport carrier group, it could make the difference. Though now it's a case of how the hell would the defender defend from that?

EDIT: Spelling

Couple points, since I admit I do agree with some of what you're going for. For one, air transports are something I would very much like to see, only done right for a change. You don't build an aircraft to transport one lousy unit, that's just silly and overly complicated. You build an air transport to send a whole bunch of units, and unload them all very very quickly to get into the battle fast.

What I'm personally envisioning here is basically a quick and simple rocket to get a single unit from from a planet to a moon, and a cannon to send multiple units to other places in the same system or even in other systems. And as I mentioned above, I'm also envisioning large air transports for tactical flexibility on planets. Lastly for quick long distance inter-stellar flight I'm envisioning a moon launched single robot rocket capable of high speed acceleration/deceleration to make interstellar transport reasonable.

This is another area where I'm not sure you're in the proper mindset of a killer robot. Robots are at the end of the day expendable. Sending a one way disposable robot across deep space is infinitely cheaper than sending a two way capable transport of some kind that can handle multiple robots.

Single robot cannons or rockets are extremely cheap.

I just cannot emphasize that enough. Rockets and cannons are the cheap way. Actual transports capable of two way flight are expensive and in pretty much all cases, irrelevant to, "brutally efficient machines of war."

The most natural tactic in the world here is to just send out single robots into space via cannon or disposable rocket. Send them by the hundreds. Send them by the thousands. Send them by the millions. Who cares of some of them land in the enemy base and get slaughtered. Others will make it to nearby unoccupied planets or moons and be able to establish a new base to continue the fight.

You did however get me thinking about one issue. What if all of the available planets moons and asteroids in the system are already defended. In this case, I guess maybe we do need another unit type that can handle some sort of assault team to establish a beachhead. This is one of those cases where you may actually need something a bit fancier than a single robot rocket or cannon.

^ ------- ^
This Exactly.
We need some "bunkerbuster" strategical options to break into worlds which are too entrenched.

Actually, I got thinking and I have a goofy idea for this one that might be pretty cool. We already know we have asteroids as KEWs. Knowing that, what's so different about just using this to drop an entire asteroid loaded up with factories and cannons and everything else you may need into orbit in a hostile system to use as a beachhead for an assault?

Well wouldn't that come under a crazy bombardment of anti KEW missiles that would blow it to bits?

Not to be mister negitive, but asteroids, in my case nokias, should be able to fix that, because not aseroids will destroy planets

So Basically like they were in SupCom:FA?

The Way I see it;
Air Transports - Planet -> Same Planet(basically they don't ever leave the planet they're built on)
Rocket as seen in the KS Visualization - Planet -> Moon in Planet Orbit(Other options depend on things we don't know yet)
Unit Cannon - Moon/Asteroid in Planet Orbit -> Planet
Shutte - Planet Orbit <-> Moon/Asteroid
Dropship - Anywhere

Once you get established on a moon or just off planet in general I don't like the idea of single unit rockets, its just not in line with the large number of units you'll have to deal with, at least in terms of combat units. For engineers I like the idea as presented in the KS Visualization for the Engineers going form the moon to the asteroid, that makes sense in terms of just setting up a new base, but when I need to send 100 units off to war, don't make me build 100 rockets for them, let me build 5 Shuttles or Dropships for them.

It's not about equal rights for robots, the fact is that they are only expendable if you can afford to replace them, sending 50 bots to an enemy planet only for them to die and not accomplish anything is a waste of your resources and only gives your enemy more via reclaiming.

Mike

I agree with all but the last point - the dropship. I don't mind drop ships in general but I can't see how they can apply to "anywhere". It would just take too long and slow the game down.

IMO the dropship would be a great tool to go from planet to adjacent planet and little more just because of the time factor.

So you keep colonising worlds, moving from one to the next until you encounter the enemy. You either have a skirmish on the same planet and whether you win or lose, the end result is that you and your enemy are now on adjacent planets. Then you each build defences and a staging area on this world and gather a bunch of dropships and amass an army there, created from all your factories on other planets via galactic gates. You load up and drop your ships on the enemy planet to hopefully annihilate the enemy and capture the world. If this doesn't work it's asteroid time.

I see this as a natural progression of play.

I second that. I recognize that against a heavily fortified planet, or even system there may need to be an option there. I don't think this is it.

I would rather see KEWs.
I would rather see interplanetary cannons.
I would rather see interplanetary cannons launching paratroopers.

Even with just those three options that are basically already confirmed as things that will be in the game, I think there's enough there that you realistically can make a siege against a planet.

And I also threw out the crazy idea of using an asteroid as a mobile base rather than using a spaceship. You've managed to fortify up every single planet moon and asteroid in an entire system in a massive epic multi-system battle? Okay, maybe I can't drop single units into your system anymore. But can you stop me now that I've parked an entire asteroid into your system fully loaded with all the factories and cannons I can cram onto it? And in addition to that, I've also thrown several extra asteroids in to slam into your largest worlds in the system that could give me problems.

I don't know about you, but to me that sounds a heck of a lot more AWESOME! than using dropships.

With tactics like that available to us, do we really need dropships?

Do you really want to risk having dropships replace all those tactics? Because the simple reality is logic alone requires dropships to be a heck of a lot cheaper and easier than all that cool stuff. Would you really risk ruining all of that?

Frankly I don't see the dropship replacing anything else permanently, aside from it being the only option to lift units in bulk off a planet's surface it's not all that great compared to some other options. If you have an Asteroid Fort with Facs and Unit Cannons then use it, it's going to be way more efficient than Dropships for moving large armies onto a planet surface. To me the Drop ship has 2 Main roles, Lifting up units from the planet surface and long range deployment. Yes, the Dropship can do the same thing as the unit cannon, but as I laid out the UC is a short range, but highly efficient options while the Dropship is a longer ranged(It can travel from anywhere to anywhere) but it's not very efficient. It's going to have a decent cost attached to it's capablities so unless you plant o either land units on a planet far away and lift them off if needed Shuttles might better suit your needs. If you need to get a large army onto a planet the Unit Cannons can do so quickly and cheaply.

Mike

Yep, you don't need those things to replace each other. You can keep them all and have them as alternatives to each other, optimized differently. Whilst I don’t think loading up an asteroid with facs and then “land” it on a planet to work as a ‘dropped base’ is neither cool nor a good mechanic gameplay-wise, I guess using asteroids as mobile bases is a neat idea. But please go away with interplanetary unit cannons. I would say unit cannons can only target astronomical object that orbit the same planet as the object the cannon is built on and the planet itself. Everything else would be totally ridiculous and absolutely not awesome - I guess suspension of disbelief here? - At least for me it would kill it.

I don't think it is the only option for getting units off the planet's surface. By the time you are at the stage in the game where you are wanting to move units beyond an adjacent planet you will be at a sufficient tech level and have sufficient economic strength to start thinking about galactic gates. Certainly when you take your first foriegn planet you probably won't want to think about taking your units further for a while. you're going to want to colonise and reinforce. By the time you have done this you would probably just build a galactic gate to link this planet to your existing network of gates anyway. Through which you can reinforce your army and send engineers to begin colonisation.

IMO the galactic gate fulfils a role that is a key element to keeping the game moving at a bearable rate. I'm not saying you couldn't go leapfrogging from one planet to the next conventionally using dropships. I just make the point that once you have to go maybe three or four planets from your original planet to your front line that dropships become an inefficient way to do this. If you have factories on other planets you don't want them to become useless when the front line moves forward. In order to keep the game dynamic, galactic gate or some other similar solution needs to be employed. Why reinvent the wheel?

I agree that getting units off the planet is an issue that pretty much only dropships can solve early on. I just take issue, and it is my opinion, with the going anywhere part. I can't see how it would benefit gameplay if you could just travel anywhere efficiently using a dropship.

For the record, I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to go anywhere. I just think perhaps a dropship laden with units is going to be massive - just to make it worthwhile. It then has inherent drawbacks:
1. It should need a large amount of fuel and if fuel is something they are going to factor in like in like in previous games that should limit it's range.
2. The above point means that you would need infrastructure such as refuelling/repair pads in place to support them and other craft moving between worlds.
3. It's speed should be balanced. Slow enough to discourage it for use over large distances (I define large as anything further than adjacent planets). And fast enough to make it an effective way of transporting a landing force to an adjacent hostile planet.

So that you have an argument for galactic gates?