Planetary Assaults and Interstellar Transportation

Well my idea of how platforms are made is that you build a Orbital Module at the Launch Gantry that then gets rocketed into the orbital level, however that works exactly. Then it can act as the core for orbital platforms, though it has some simple defense. I had put the idea on another thread that you could use the Orbital Module in invasions to act as a kind of starting defense and orbital beachhead. If something like it comes into play it would be where orbital engineers come from, if the orbital level isn't just satellites and platforms. When I read this thread I had thought of this concept and how it could be pretty much complement the carrier. This would do away with the complaints about spaceships, as this would be a low level equivalent of moving in an asteroid base.

EDIT: forgot a word

I don't see much resemblance between what you describe and carriers as I described them. Actually my idea of carriers was just 'transport-transports'. What you describe sounds like an orbital bastion... I am not saying I don't like you idea, but I don't quite see the need for it, as bases can be built on asteroids...

I thought of something like this:




black: carrier
red: dropship
yellow: planetary surface transport (air transport/ amphibious transport etc.)
green: normal units (tanks, bots, engies, the commander etc.)


Edit:Numbers are arbitrarily chosen!

Hmm, Orbital Bastion I like it! When I looked back at my post I realized what I had said. I meant for it to work with the carrier. I imagined it being sent along or right before the carriers to act as a orbital siege-breaker. It would make an opening for the carriers to land so they wouldn't be instantly taken out by orbital weaponry. It could be viewed as a cheaper quicker alternative to asteroid bases against lower defended bases, though it wouldn't have nearly the initial capacity or survivability of the asteroid base.

EDIT: needed minor tweaking.

Ah okay, I get it now. Well I think those cosiderations are a little too indepth for moment.

Like I said, it's added complexity with the same function, Also I don't agree with Air Transports(and possibly Air units in general) being able to load into Dropships, I see it as a partial balancing mechanic because if you can transport your army it doesn't matter where you land, when it really should, allowing the Sieged player the option to say park a Laser Defense Sat on top his base forcing you to land elsewhere or to accept the loses it'll inflict. This is on top of the other stuff I've mentioned previously.

Mike

That is a very detailed balance consideration. I see your point though. But I cannot say I am convinced of it, as it is - like I said - it a very detailed balance consideration.

So so you agree with me, but not?

Mike

Yes, I understand the motivation for you concerns, but still I think it is too early to actually have those, as they are derived from possible imbalances, that might be caused by planetary transports being carried by dropships, though we can actually not say anything about the balance yet, as balance is the product of many variables indeed interacting, which we don't know at this time either. But imagining a scenario where the matter in question causes imbalances is of course fairly easily conceivable, thus I see your point.

Thank you for your attention.

Has started me thinking about how we are going to make the transition between:

space travel>orbital layer>Planet surface.

All very well having space transport (as a generic term), but then we need to think about if/how we are going to move these through the orbital layer or not and how they will apply to planet surface combat. I guess this is basically what you guys are trying to thrash out here?

The simple option would be to have a dropship capable of loading or unloading from orbital layer or planets surface. Bypassing orbital if none exists or attempting to breach through if players dictate such an action. Inherent risks there are obvious.

Another issue with 'balancing' is that by having a 'carrier' or transport for transports you are increasing the value of said unit. In the time I have been discussing this I've heard people talk about all kinds of figures up to 500 units per transport. I have no idea what the final scale we're talking about but in the end it's almost irrelevant. It's more about the ratio of what that transport holds to the proportion of your force it makes up. If you have two 500 unit transports and that is 50% of your entire force you can see the issue. A carrier would have to be near invincible to make it worthwhile.

It wouldn't have to be near invincible, it would probably be much better to have quite a few attempt to drop than having 1-2 with all your units. Invasions should be started with unit cannon bombardment(if interplanetary launches are feasible) to distract the defender while the dropships/carriers/whatever they are called are attempting to drop(possibly in multiple areas to spread out the defenders) as the Orbital Bastion(s)/Asteroid Station arrive right before or at the same time as the dropships/carriers to act as defenders for the invaders.

The concept of using multiple ships is similar to anything like D-Day or invading any heavily fortified area. Strike with enough forces and the enemy literally can't destroy enough to prevent someone(thing as we talking about machines) from getting close enough to weaken defenses.

Yeah, that's basically the point I was making when you read between the lines. Invincible units are obviously never a viable option. For the record, it was an example of something I read in another topic.

People need to get realistic when they are suggesting things like I described. I think for the most part people are getting carried away with the scale of this game when we have no solid figures to suggest anything other than that it will be equal to or greater in size than SC:FA.

It was me talking of 500+ units. I said, you could also have such big space transports instead of a gate. Given that even in supcom you could have up to 200 t1 tanks at times, I highly doubt 500 units in a single battle force is unrealistic for PA. And why are you talking of invincibility anyways? There is no reason to assume carriers or dropships would need to be invincible when they can carry 500 units. Why? Because also experimental in supcom had the value of several hundred t1/t2 units and they were absolutely not invincible.

Yeah I agreed, though it wouldn't be exactly the same because you are restricted to your destination with a gate and dropships are open ended.

I thought I already made that point clear?

It's OK, I think if it was obvious what I was trying to get at then there wouldn't be the need for such questions.I shouldn't have quoted figures when really what I was talking about was how much relative to your army. It's my fault you don't quite understand what I am talking about. Besides that it was an example of something that no one would ever consider putting in a game because it is ridiculous as a standard unit.

I highlight experimental because here it wasn't a standard unit available to all - which makes it irrelevant and that is why I didn't bother mentioning it. Or the one in SC2 for that matter. You have to be able to destroy it if it has an entire army of units inside it. Basically you've taken what I said out of context.

So now I have glossed over that issue... If you are talking about carriers and dropships being the only way to get planetside then it is a strange choice to say that they could carry 50% of your entire force without some kind of way to offset the risk of losing half your army in one go. That is why the whole idea is ridiculous.

In my opinion a better way to do this would possibly be to do away with the carriers altogether and just concentrate on dropships as the only way to transport your units. If you are going to put them into dropships anyway, then having an unnecessary secondary loading action into a carrier is superfluous.

Unless... You were to have a sort of high speed carrier that basically loaded up your dropships and quickly transported them to a location on the star map. That would basically be doing a similar job to a galactic gate with the same issue I mentioned about open ended destinations and high speed travel. At least it would give you a reason to have that second loading and unloading action.

Well, that is exactly what I proposed in the start post...This is the reason why I called this thread planetary assaults (drop ships) and interstellar transportation (carriers). It is just that in the meantime the idea came up, that carriers also might have their merit for interplanetary transportation, triggered by this post by mecharius:

After all if carriers might be useful for interplanetary transport depends on how fast drop ships can travel. If for some hypothetical reasons of balance they had a very limited speed, you would need faster carriers... or whatever reason. I don't quite care about carriers, unlike dropships. I do want dropship-like units in the game, because I think they would really add to it... unlike carriers by themselves. Carriers would just be an additional element that might be required to make drop ships work properly, for some unworn reason.

I'm in favour of the full dropship carrier mechanic, and like anyone else reading this thread have my own ideas on how to do so.

Two words: Modular Carriers
I'm thinking carriers should be both very tough (interplanetary transport will likely be expensive however you use it, so that investment needs to be protected) and also vulnerable in a way that means they can have their mission foiled in a way that does not immediately destroy them.

Starting similar to thelambaster's carrier image, I'm imagining one that's essentially a spine with external bays say 5 of these for the sake of argument:

B---I---I---I---I---I--E
[--][--][--][--][--]

B = Bridge E = Engines [--] = Empty bay

have TL2 Air transports act as dropships capable of docking with the carrier (maybe slightly bigger than tl1 air trans, but otherwise not significantly different) - note that these would just externally dock rather than enter a bay, and so could be 'shot off'

depending on the scale you wanted the carrier to be, you could have a single dropship per bay, or several attached at different locations around the same spine section (a ring of 3?)

Now here's where the idea get different (and maybe overly complicated):

allow the player to customise the carrier by building modules to replace the docking points, so more flexibility at the cost of transport capability.

I'm imagining:

Supplementary engine modules [EE]
Large slow invasion, or add these for a smaller rapid reaction force?

Point Defense modules [PD]
protect your valuable dropships from enemy missiles whilst en-route ?

Light orbital bombardment module [OB]
onliy light, so as to support the assault without being overpowering?

pre-fab droppable building module [PF] (restricted to specific building types?)
get a head start on a beach-head?

space fighter hanger module [SF]
fighters not controlled directly - tell the carrier to attack another space vehicle and if in range, the fighters do the deed and return to re-arm?


The carrier would be essentially useless without dropships or modules, so once they've been shot off, you'd be forced to retreat.
would 5 module / transport bays be too much? maybe reduce them to 3, so players couldn't use them as generic 'do everything' ships

I'm also thinking the range of direct control needs to be limited to specific destinations - movement orders limited to selecting it's position in the planet's Synchronous orbit, or if you did give it an attack order, trying to automatically match courses with the targetted ship till it's in range, launching fighters, and then (unsure which) either having matched course heading to it's target's destination, or returning to it's orbit of origin.

To avoid complicating things (Ha!) I'd not give any direct factory capability or (non-dropship) unit storage capability to the carrier - no repeated shuttlings for a drop, and no way to fill that capacity whilst in orbit (pre-fabs need to un-pack on landing). Hangers should probably be able to manufacture replacement space fighters though...

you'd also have to make sure that modules could not be built by the carrier, maybe by an orbital engineer, or when attached to a space dock. This would prevent players from building droppable factories en-route and using a single round trip to claim the entire system.

Oooohh. As a final thought - how about an interstellar Jump/warp engine module? with multiple modules increasing the maximum range?
If so, do you do a Homeworld style instant hyperspace jump (teleport arguments nonwithstanding), or finite speed warp? Do you require that the Commander be docked with the carrier to enable this (preventing mass interstellar invasions) and would that be on his own, to the bridge or in a regular docked transport? do you allow the carrier to jump straight from system A planetary orbit to system b planetary orbit, or my preference, have to fly to and from the edge of each system either side of a jump?

I feel that if you are playing a massive galactic MP game, you'd have to be able to bring at least a small force with you if you had to invade another system thats already established, but you wouldn't want to let players swarm a new system with a dozen carriers at once.

So,

CB---I---I---I---I---I--E
[PD][PF][TP][TP][JD]

[JD] = Jump drive module
A jump-capable carrier with the commander docked with the bridge, some point defence, an orbit droppable factory and two TL2 transports...

We definitely need some sort of way to transport invasion forces from Point A to Point B. Now, some ideas here, like the unit cannon, require at least some control over a system. A planet to launch the rocket from or build the unit cannon on. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO GET IT IT THE FIRST PLACE? With a big-*** kilometers-long unit-packed over-hyphenated MEGA-SHIP! This game is all about scale, right? And shooting for awesome, right? And what is more huge and awesome than dropping 1500 killer robots onto a planet from a mobile orbital platform larger than most European countries? Doing it ACROSS STAR SYSTEMS! Modular super-carriers, dropships, and planetary assaults are the way to go if you're shooting for scale and awesome

Required Reading: PSA - Realism VS Awesome

Mike

If any sort of transports exist, I would not want them to be able to transport 500 units at once. At most I would be thinking 25 or 50 units. Why would any commander put all their units in a single transport? That's just asking for it to get shot down.

Nor would I want any unit to be indestructible. Everything should be killable. Some things of course are harder to kill than others.

Finally, I'm not so sure we really need interplanetary dropships. Air transports sure. but for interplanetary we are probably getting those snazzy cannons. Those look more fun to me anyhow. Maybe if the cannons are considerably cheaper than dropships but only can launch k-bots, where the dropships can transport any unit, that might make a fair amount of sense.

The idea of a single transport carrying 500 units is crazy!

500 units was the unit cap in TA and SupCom (it was later raised), and the OP is suggesting that a single transport be allowed to ferry an entire army from planet to planet.

It seems like the longer this thread gets, the more irrational the OP gets.

I agree that there needs to be interplanetary transport ships in PA -- I don't think that teleportation is the way to go. But where the OP went off track was the suggestion of both Drop Ships and "Interstellar" Transports, because it's obviously inspired by James Cameron's Aliens and/or Halo, wherein a starship (Sulaco or Pillar of Autumn) transports marines through space, which are deployed to the surface via Dropships (Cheyenne or Pelican).

Dropships are unnecessary and would needlessly complicate the game. WHY is it necessary for the player to load units onto Dropships, then load those Dropships onto a large Transport ship, which flies to another planet or moon, deploys the Dropships, which then drop off the units on the surface? Why not just load units onto the large transport ship and drop them off? There's no reason why the large transport ship can't land on a planet or moon. It doesn't need Dropships.

If the emphasis was on realism, Dropships make sense for many practtical reasons. But Dropships would add an unnecessary level of complexity to an ambitious game that is already trying to pull off things that have never been done before. Give Uber a break and abandon this ridiculous idea of Dropships and motherships. PA only needs Interplanetary Transport ships. Simple and effective. Done.

I had personally always thought that the individual dropships would be just ai extensions of the carriers. You would tell the carrier to load up units at spot A and the carrier would then send the dropships down grab them and go back. I think that and having the carriers use just the interplanetary ui to get from planet A to planet B would shut up some of the more annoying people. I've always seen it as mass effect 1 movement not what many are thinking, which is more mass effect 2-3 ish, which pretty much IS what the interplanetary ui is(and off topic for a sec, what I wish they would have kept for the rest of the mass effect games). A lot of the arguing I've seen in many of the threads seem to be along the lines that OrangeKnight has so eloquently spelled out.