Query: Bomber attack behaviour

I searched and checked the forncirmed neatures thread, but I did not find an answer.

I do not have the alpha, I have merely watched alpha videos, and while I am aware most current weapon effects are placeholders, I was wondering: will bombers eventually work as they did in TA?



In TA: bombers dropped a line of bombs with the middle bomb aimed directly at the target. For smaller units, only the middle bomb would directly hit, and they would receive splash damage from the "inside" bombs, and escape the outer bombs entirely (although these were likely to hit nearby units). T2 bombers simply dropped a longer line with 10 bombs. The bombs followed a straight line path to the ground, as they received the aircrafts velocity and were affected by gravity but not air resistance. iirc there was an exploit where you could micro a bomber into dropping a chain of dozens of bombs while turning, spraying them everywhere.

In Supcom: bombers dropped a line of 6 bombs that just fell straight down from the bombers position at the time of bomb release; iirc they start stationary then accelerate down with gravity. I don't remember damage effects, possibly the UEF one split into clusters? Either way, I think it was largely irrelevant, correct me if I'm wrong. T3 bombers fired a single very powerful bomb with a large splash zone at their target with kinetics similar to a TA bomb.

Mass bombing in TA had a pleasant chaos about it; the bomb spacing meant bombing larger footprint units such as buildings was more effective than bombing smaller units, and in bombing a group of ground units (due to ground pathfinding traffic jams) bombers could damage multiple units in one run, including friendly fire if bombing an active battle. To say nothing of chaos due to air pathfinding (the two initial streams of bombers directed at one target vs the random flight paths of bombers surviving for a second run at targets picked randomly. I don't think any of this applied to the same extent in supcom due to unit scales, weapon ranges and pathfinding differences.

In PA, currently, as I understand from videos, bombers fire a single bomb at their target as supcom T3 bombers did. In my opinion that's rather boring, it's a bit too clean. I should like to see them act like "TA bombers plus"; dropping a line of bombs which inherit the parent vehicles speed and receive gravity and (unlike in TA) air resistance (so they follow a parabola rather than a line), and also a very slight random offset perpendicular to the bombers velocity, so the line of bombs is not completely straight, but not so much that it would affect the bomb hitting even the smallest target.

TL;DR: Uber, can you clarify your plans for bomb behaviour in PA 1.0?

PS: Nuts, I meant to use the scathis awesome face somewhere in that diagram. Ah well.

One thing that I liked about the bombers in SupCom, when they dropped their bombs straight down, is that you could have them on fire at will and just fly above enemy spam to carpet bomb the spam.
In TA and later FA you are forced to target the units individually or if you have the planes on patrol they will pick a target and only bomb it after they have flown away and turned around to make another pass.

It would be cool if the bombers could drop bombs automatically by checking if there are enemies ahead of them.
They would then have to do weapons check in an area infront of them where the bombs would land if they dropped the bombs in the flight and on patrol they could pick targets infront of this area so that they have time to turn against their target instead of picking the closest enemy relative to the planes' position because then they are likely to be forced to fly away and turn around before they can drop their bombs on their target.

I think, carpet bomber and single point bomber should be separate units. Carpet-bomber would be good against groups of land units, but too weak and inaccurate to seriously harm buildings, especially relatively compact defense towers. Single-point-bomber on the other hand would be good against buildings, but mostly ineffective against units due to long reload and small AoE.

And they really, really need good AI. Operating bombers in FA is the most irritating thing to do.

sure thing in sup com NONE of the bombs dropped from bombers fell straight down (they are more like the ones you described from TA). No idea where you got that from. As for the effects and behaviour you had everything even within the same race. UEF t1 was comparable to world war I navy bombing run bombers with five shells, t2 ones were like real napalm pass bombers from the vietnam war and functioned exactly as you'd imagine and finally the UEf t3 bomber was an single explosive shell of very high but also very small area damage it had the highest Dps out of t3 bombers but the fact that it was the smallest aoe made it the least "precise". then there were a bunch of variations that I won't go into detail but as an example seraphim t1 bombers had a single very powerfull and very large area of effect shell, it's t2 was concentrated damage. cybran t1 was similar to uef but it's t2 was a volley of missiles, that were very accurate and quite high dps, it's t3 bomber was the lowest DPS one but had the biggest area of effect (it also featured stealth).

then there were also torpedo bombers which let go of torpedoes that first fell straight down into the water (still with a very small foward progression, though) and then started homing on the target once in the water.

The Strategic Bombers had a bunch of back and forths between straight down drops and simulated drops to get things fixed/working properly.

Mike

I only ever talk about the final, I don't generally judge a game on it's 1.0 version.

That doesn't mean everyone's experience is the same as yours, I bet there are people out there who have never updated their games and been none the wiser. It also doesn't mean it never happened or anything either. It's not about judging, it's about facts, and the fact is that Strategic Bombers had both bomb patterns over the course of the last 6 years so it's easy to see how others might be mistaken.

Mike

I know that and my replies encourage to try updated version as truely it represents a world of difference and strategy the way Chris Taylor wanted it and the way alot of TA fans wanted it.

You are not talking about vanilla SupCom. You are talking about Forged Alliance. You can lump them together many times but this is one time you can't lump them together.

Now if I remember correctly the bombs were only patched after FA came out to inherit the speed of the bomber and not drop straight down. I'm not sure if that change made it into vanilla SupCom however I do remember that for most of SupComs lifetime the bombs would drop straight down from t1 bombers(I consider vanilla SupCom to be dead after FA came out(The king is dead, long live the king!(that sort of stuff))).

1.0? That is when the game was released. When would the appropriate time to judge it be if not then?
What is the final version of SupCom?
The last patch to vanilla SupCom? The last official patch for Forged Alliance? The latest patch in community developed Forged Alliance Forever?

For me there is a current version of Forged Alliance in FAF which is the one most people play.
I wouldn't call that a "final" version as it is still being patched and developed.

What I might qualify as a final version is the last version that the developers release but that version only remains final until somebody else patches it and continues development.

And which one is that?
I don't think that Chris Taylor was involved in the latest FAF patch.

Forge Alliance bombers arced through the air.

Sup1's (vanilla's) bombers went straight down.


But as people has already said; lots of people want carpet bombing. Ballistic carpet bombing is more difficult to code than straight-down carpetting.

Surely that's more of a pathfinding/formation issue rather than bomb kinetics. Once you've coded aiming for a gravity/velocity/air resistance bomb (let's call it GARIV), asking bombers to carpet bomb an area is merely assigning targets, a different task entirely.

godde you know so little... patch 3603 was for all intents and purposes Chris Taylor's editor's cut, that he was furious THQ never released leaving the game in it's unfinished 3599 state. FAF released this patch as the playable stock version and continued improving upon it.

Furthermore he HAS given Faf his validation more than once I've posted in another thread his interview here it is again his pseudonym is DrDeath and it starts at 1:29 http://www.twitch.tv/thebigonetv/c/1520596
part 2 : http://www.twitch.tv/thebigonetv/c/1520600

as for further evidence I'll leave it to ZePilot (Faf's creator and maintainer and owner) but he was pretty clear in a thread that you can follow from here

to me, all of this makes FAF latest the true version. the way it's meant to be played™ x')
If you'd spit on seraphim, if you'd even spit on nomads then god help you.

many of this information can be found at wikepedia, gpgnet forums, the faf website.

Yeah, from my understanding that's the case.

The attack-manager in FA was broken. So much as touching it via code cause a crash back to desktop. Which meant that giving targets (or the ground under the target) was pretty limited. You could do it via code, but it would clobber any queue of commands you gave the unit(s).

Thats cool.
But still.
If someone say that bombers dropped their bombs straight down in SupCom they are telling the truth.
If someone say that upgrading mexes is useless because mass fabs are much better in SupCom they are also true.
If someone say that land experimentals are overpriced and beaten badly by Siege Assualts Bots for cost in SupCom they are also right.
Sometimes you have to separate SupCom and Forged Alliance.

no I do not have to seperate a game and it's better versions.

If later on in life on a forum for a "spirituall sucessor game to the great title of the olden days of gaming back when we played on plasma screens, not hologram screens, called PA" and let's say the game will be called "Strategical Potato Mashing" or something, I dunno, I see someone in your posision saying PA did this that way, that I recongnise as something from PA on release day before post release day-patch; a year later a game extention called "galactic domination" and reboot yet another year later with engine rework called "PA - into the black hole" I'll be like screw this idiot, he has no idea what he's talking about and what he's missing out on, that's not the game me and the majority know.

The majority you say...
I bet the majority of people who have played SupCom hasn't used FAF.

Has the majority even played Forged Alliance?

yes we often all ask one another in a sir-esque way "what was your gpg name?" one sentence that's basically become lingo in faf. ("gpg name" here refers to the gpgnet pseudonym on the multiplayer platform for FA and SupCom)

also faf obliterates gpg's high times in many ways and the community is growing.

Of course. People who played FA during the GPGnet coming back is no surprise. I would be most surprised if many new people played FA now for the first time.
That still doesn't mean that the majority of players who ever played SupCom has used FAF.
You would have to show some numbers in order to convince me of that.

When it matters I'm gonna separate SupCom and the expansion Forged Alliance. I think you should too because the balance is very different in some occasions.
There are only 3 factions in vanilla SupCom for example.

I know all this, I've played both and for me it's really is a senario of "once you go black you can't go back" , there really is nothing to go back to for me, it's all been uphill. the patches the bugfixes the races the performance increases, the scale increase, the balance the UI features all over the in-game lobby and in-game. all uphill. but there will always be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzwQmUAJjoI

also I don't have the stats but maybe we can have ZePilot chip in, just PM him with the link to this thread.

Don't get me wrong. FA is a big improvement over SupCom in almost all aspects.

But the thing you call SupCom that is FAF might be not considered, by many or perhaps most people, as the original Supreme Commander game and the reviews of the game made during the first versions will not reflect the improvements made over 6 year since the release.

They couldn't play against Sorians AI, didn't have many of the new optimisations, game mods or UI mods.