Rethinking Air Combat

There's a couple topics in here that talk about air, and more specifically the one about aircraft carriers, and I think it's worth having a discussion about the pros and cons of the TA/ Supcom aircraft system, and whether there's a better way to implement aircraft.

Ledarsi makes a good summary of the difficulty of incorporating air support units like aircraft carriers here.

TA / Supcom Style

- Aircraft turn on a dime / hover
- No range limitations
- Large swarms common
- 'Tanks that fly' concept
- 'fuel' attempt in Supcom that was clunky and ineffective


Pros:
- easy to understand (simple extension of tank combat)
- easy to manage (build, clump, attack target)
- stackable firepower (100 planes in a clump)
- not blocked by terrain

Cons:
- Often became the endgame unit of choice because aircraft were comparable to tanks and had much better maneuverability (hawk swarms of TA, ASF swarms of FA)
- Hard to balance against the ground units - if ground units can shoot a hovering gunship, the gunship needed to have higher HP to be cost effective, which resulted in things like gunships having more HP than heavy tanks.
- Aircraft were so maneuverable that terrain became irrelevant.
- Aircraft carriers & air repair pads did not contribute much at all
- Once a player's airforce is established, no area of map is safe to build a outpost on as the outpost doesn't have enough firepower to fend off the huge cloud of aircraft descending on it.


Alternative Ideas

I'd like to bring back into serious consideration the concept of airbases, and rethink the UI so that rather than picking a base and giving an attack order, you manage your airspace at a higher level - designate areas for CAP, have interceptor squads standing by, laying out a bombing run with escorts and then executing, that sort of thing. Rather than waving a blob of aircraft around, you'd paint an area to be defended and fighters would scramble from nearby airbases to intercept an incoming threat.

I'd also love to see aircraft actively avoid each other, and altitude come into play - high altitude bombers should be able to avoid much of the ground based AA, and low level NOE flying gunships should be able to get in under the radar for surprise attacks.


I'm not sure what the best way to link an aircraft to an airbase is - some ideas have been floated on restricting range from the base, or an ammo counter that slowly refills on its own but refills very quickly when near the airbase. The key is to remove the micromanagement of wobbling those ASFs over a target just to get them to fire at the ground more often than your opponent, while at the same time making the resupply option a strategic decision rather than a source of more micro.


The Idea - Overview

Aircraft management has always been difficult in TA and Supcom. Despite attempts to promote individual airstrikes and spread out bombing runs, the fact is that the most common usage of aircraft is to make a giant blob, and wave it around the map. Even worse, the constraints put on aircraft were easily supplanted by micro - bombers could be coaxed to drop huge strings of bombs if the player picked targets the right distance away, and fighters could be forced to hover or turn on a dime, encouraging the player to micromanage his aircraft - and the more you have to micro your aircraft, the less time you have to manage more than one set of aircraft at a time.

To address this, I have come up with an idea that takes the micromanagement out of the picture, and brings control up a level so that you can orchestrate coordinated attacks, escorts, and transportation without worrying about the nitty gritty of where an individual plane may be.

Four main pillars of the idea:

1. Operating aircraft should cost resources
2. The player should not have direct control over individual aircraft
3. Aircraft should behave more like aircraft and less like hover tanks
4. Altitude should matter.

This is predicated on a few assumptions:
1. TA style aircraft give a large advantage to the one who micros
2. It will be difficult to micro an air blob across multiple planets
3. Aircraft patrolling your base perimeter and/or landing in your base TA style is messy
4. Most importantly, a unit that can cross immense amounts of terrain at high speed with a huge amount of stackability and potential damage output will always be more desirable than a land unit for anything other than assaulting heavily defended bases.

Ok, I made a little sketch on the concepts I outline below:


Control
- Aircraft are controlled via the player managing 2 things - Routes, and Zones.
- Routes are drawn on the map, and designate plane movement. Routes are smoothed out and control points can be added or removed by the player (just like a vector drawing app handles drawing curves)
- Zones are painted on the map - simple add/ remove
- Planes attempt to do their best to follow their assigned route, but avoid each other any any terrain that gets in the way.
- Patrol routes allow the player to dedicate a certain amount of resources to keeping their planes in the air. This would represented with a blue line the user can click to add points to or drag around, and a UI element that shows the player how many planes are availabe for the route, and allows the player to set a bar (0-100%) for the number of planes in the air, along with average resource drain. (Eg, 10 planes on patrol might cost an average of x resources per second to create the supplies for that patrol).
- Attack routes allow the player to plan and execute attacks on the enemy. This would involve creating the route, and then selecting the route and assigning a number of bomber groups and fighter groups to the attack route. Once assignment is complete, planes will start to move into position in the nearest airbases, and the player can then click on the route at any time and then click 'launch' and all the fighters and bombers will lift off and execute their attack run. This could be expanded to include more than one attack route and synchronized attacks.
- Transportation routes would indicate a loading/unloading area, and transports assigned to the route would automatically pick up units that arrive in the loading area.
- Defensive Zones would be an area designated by the player as requiring defense (suprise!). A defensive zone would automatically create a larger area around it which would trigger a scramble if enemy fighters encroached on that airspace. This area could automatically be calculated and displayed so the player knows how much area he needs eyes on to properly defend his zone.
- Instant Attack Zones would simply be an area the player wants to attack NOW. Paint over an area and all enemy units in the area are targeted (paint small to pick a single target)A slider could show how many aircraft are available, and a quick group button could designate all nearby aircraft of a specific type. Eg. All nearby gunships that can be here in 10 seconds, attack this target now.

Cost
- All aircraft cost resources to move and fight. Lets call these resources.. nanogel supplies, for lack of a better term. Different actions use up supplies at different rates - standard cruising speed could use hardly any, combat speed could use more, and firing missiles could eat up a big chunk.
- All aircraft would carry a reserve amount of supplies in order to automatically return to base at top speed.
- Resupply is quick if the airbase is stocked with supplies, but a long battle could deplete your supplies stored in your airbase, reducing the effectiveness of your aircraft.

Airbases
- This requires aircraft to be based in an airbase - this could be something as simple as a japanese parking garage style hangar where planes lift off one by one, or it could be a multi-runway aircraft carrier. Airbases have an unlimited aircraft storage capacity, but have a limited amount of supply storage & generation capability
- Aircraft are smart enough to resupply at the nearest airbase which has sufficient supplies
- This brings back the need / usefulness of aircraft carriers and forward bases, as you can only project power so far before you need to come back for resupply.

Couldn't you bump the relevant thread where theres already pages of discussion on this exact idea instead of creating a new one?

Also airbases are a bad idea. For reasoning please see previous gigantic thread. Come on pawz, you should know better.

I agree with zordon- this thread as set out doesn't seem to set forth a new question or topic of discussion. There's plenty we haven't talked about with regards to air combat which might deserve a thread. But as written this post really belongs in one of the other air warfare threads.

Anything particular you want to talk about with regards to air combat? Some new system, new idea, new mechanic we can discuss?

Yeah, Pawz, you silly twit.

I happen to disagree - there are a number of threads that discuss air, but all of them assume a model like Supcom, and what I'd like to see is a different model altogether.

Eg Aircraft categories or Aircraft Carriers

I know it might be too much of a stretch to ask people to visualize a system that's different from the standard 'known' system. It is, however, a fact that air combat has been dumbed down to 'tanks that fly', and few people seem willing to challenge that concept anymore.

I completely agree that aircraft as a system deserves being significantly rethought for PA.

However I specifically recall I myself posted a quite similar thread to this one- and there are multiple others as well. My post was New System for Aircraft, and I seem to recall the reason I made that thread was the monster thread about aircraft was getting very lost in the weeds with half a dozen subjects at once.

My own thinking has advanced to include aircraft being more count-based than HP-based. I agree aircraft should not be just tanks that happen to fly. I think it would be good for planes to be fragile, high-speed, high-firepower units relying on speed and avionics for survival, rather than HP. Fights involving planes are over fast, either way.

Aircraft should get cut down by anti-air in a big way, but have the mobility and speed to choose where and when to fight. Having SAM missiles take out most aircraft in a single hit at long range, but with a low rate of fire, for example.

Advanced, expensive aircraft might be even faster, and have features like stealth and countermeasures, long range guided missiles, smart bombs, etc., but won't necessarily be much tougher.

So, basically TotalA planes. My personal favorite was the Core heavy bomber. It had a little pewpew laser and dreams of being an AC-130H.

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Aircraft have a huge freedom in what targets they can attack. The faster they are, the better it gets. This can create big problems for a game contingent on keeping a single unit alive.

One of the safer places against aircraft is underground, where their advantage means nothing. Tunnel systems and giant (potentially flying) mountains are pretty much the only barrier to keep aircraft out of the arena.

What happens if aircraft are actually forced to obey the laws of physics (not in terms of fuel)?

I'm guessing they would cross the map and fly off the edge in under 1.3 seconds and would never be seen again.

I'm not sure which physics you are mentioning, but if it's minimum airborne speed, turn physics, that kind of thing, they probably wouldn't be able to operate on most maps.

You know that PA has spherical maps, so there is no edge they can fly off? However I'm interested too, what kind of physics he means.

Oh right. In this case they'd be running circles around the map.

I'm pretty sure he means to try have planes that actually fly like planes. Sort of like how they did bombers, in that they had to make a proper run at the target to drop their bombs.

They don't have to fly at a realistic scale obviously, but it would be very interesting to lose a bit of the direct control over the flightpath in return for more realistic flight physics.

I'm confused, isn't that more or less how they functioned in SupCom1/FA?

Mike

what about the weather
in a normal flight the weather can affect how a plane fly's
like if it is flying in a desert and then a sand storm comes across it will have to land, seek shelter or get out of the storm and if it continues fling there is a chance it might blow up or have trouble shooting a target

Supcom planes aren't physics based (they do not need lift to stay in the air). It's the easiest implementation of planes, but it would be very interesting to explore the other option - making planes be limited by their realistic physical properties. It would require a different way of handling planes, but it would definitely distinguish planes from ground units in a unique manner.

Eh, I dunno, it feels like a horribly slippery slope into a stats game, it's akin to adding stuff like Torque, weight and traction to land units, it's more realistic, but how much in enhances gameplay is arguable.

SupCom air units might not be governed by aerodynamics, but at least they(for the most part) actually flew around like air units, which is already leagues ahead of most games.

Mike

Pawz worked on the Supremilated Mod for vanilla SupCom (those that played vanilla SupCom will understand the significance of this) but I really wouldn't listen to him when it came to balancing aircraft.

There was some really really dumb changes made to things that fly back then.

Then they would go a zillion times faster, find it quicker to just circle the planet rather than turn around and laugh at all that AA Flak you have. (And if they are fast enough, also laugh at those radar systems).

Not a criticism, just some fun

Why? It's simply a matter of scale. No matter what size representation the planet is scaled to, just make air units move at a suitably slow speed to scale. And make land units slow enough to scale to the map size also.

Suppose a 3,500 km radius body (Moon size) will have a circumference of 22,000 km. A plane flying at a super-futuristic 10,000 km/hr will take 2 hours, 12 minutes to make a complete circle around the moon. However since the maximum possible distance away from any given point is the exact opposite side- the longest distance it would ever need to travel is 1 hour, 6 minutes in a straight line.

Naturally the actual Moon may be a bit on the big side for PA's maps, but you get the idea.

I'm still working on a more fully fleshed out version of what I'm proposing..but Zordon et al, I can't find the 'uber thread on air'. Got a link?

And BM, if you can't differentiate between 'guys we're in the middle of ripping the air system apart' and 'here is a final polished product of the changes' then you might have difficulty with testing the alpha here... I know you're still mad at me for not finishing those changes