Rethinking Air Combat

Other posters hit on it a few posts back.

I think fuel is a dead end.
- If you put fuel restrictions on planes then you have to put fuel restrictions on everything and tanks run out of fuel, unless they just park and you use them as gun static defence, over a far shorter distance than planes do.
- When a plane runs out of fuel it falls out of the sky and is useless even if it does have weapons left on board. A tank can at least be used as gun emplacement while it waits for fuel but it's all just such a huge pain to manage. You'd have to be watching fuel and supply the whole time instead of fighting the war.

Ammo capacity is something else entirely and it can be handled by the computer without ruining the effectiveness of the unit. They become more mission oriented. They can loiter for defence or be tasked for strikes but once their guns are empty they have to return to some base unit (carrier, re-arming LZ, something) and this takes time, travel time and some minor penalty of time while it queues and goes through the re-arming animation.

Given their armaments they can still dish out a lot of damage but they won't behave as airborne tanks anymore. They'll dump their bombs and missiles but assaulting land units, even without a large anti-air contingent will have a break to close the distance to your base or give friendly aircraft time to arrive to defend while the defending aircraft re-arm.

By that rule everything should have ammo restrictions and with a little handwaving we can agree that they do. They need to rearm but it's a lot easier to rearm a tank as it sits on the ground were a lorry/rearming vehicle can get at it easily and travel with a column but there doesn't need a unit or resource to represent that.

Limited ammo for aircraft lets us make aircraft fragile, fast and effective without having to worry about fuel or making them into airborne tanks.

It also gives us a nice gradient of an aircraft's effectiveness. Unarmed scouts not included but light fighters/bombers have a little ammo and heavy fighter/bombers have more. Without factions there's no need to have further gradients to represent idiosyncratic aircraft who are for example super slow but carry unholy amounts of ammo or super cheap and fast but carry just one missile.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't also have airborne tanks. That'd be great, but they should be slow, cost a fortune and be unmaneuverable as f**king a brick.

There's no rule that says something has to apply to all units. There's nothing wrong with only certain units having ammo or fuel, and this is in fact done by plenty of games. Whatever makes the game work.

Generally speaking, I'm with Pawz on this one. Small aside, I do think limiting airbase capacity would be superior to unlimited capacity. A player should build more of them if he or she wants more air capacity.

And regarding bobucles' criticism of the high-lethality 6 missile ASF- I never said each one would kill 6 times its value. Only that it would kill 6 targets, and these types of missile ASF's would be among the most expensive birds available. Against the exact same unit, yes, they certainly do kill 6 times their value, and this fact discourages both players from getting into the ASF vs ASF blob situation, because the player who invested less comes out ahead, because a huge air battle like that is going to be over immediately, and everyone is going to be dead.

You are correct that ASF's need to be more expensive than other planes in order for this type of multiple-missile high-lethality paradigm to work. But not as expensive as you might think, due to limited ammo and fuel. Perhaps large strategic bombers or advanced stealth bombers would be more expensive. Still, a missile ASF of this type should need to kill more than one payload's worth of enemies to pay for itself under most conditions. Otherwise, you are correct, they are an obviously dominant choice and we're back to ASF spam because they're too strong for cost.

If the ASF only has six missiles before it has to go back to base to re-arm, that greatly changes how you use the plane compared to if it has unlimited missiles on a cooldown. First of all, you can't just fly into enemy territory with your fighter wing. You've got a limited amount of firepower on those ASF's. Run out of missiles and the local area's interceptor denizens will eat you alive. This means you keep the ASF's in safe places even if they are very powerful. One SAM and it's down. Get into a dogfight with cheap gun-toting interceptors, and that missile capability helps you not at all, but is quite expensive nonetheless.

If the interceptors were totally free I can't imagine anyone would use anything else, and we're back to huge air swarms. Although if you severely limited their operational range, and had limited airbase capacity, this could still work. Players would still build expensive aircraft in order to reach out from the immediate area around their airbases.

The fuel system in Supcom is a pain in the ***. Your aircraft will run out of fuel and move at a snail's pace unless you do one of three things:

1. Leave aircraft parked on the ground until you need them (sort of defeats the point in having them in the first place)

2. Make resupply pads under their patrol route (ok, but inflexible)

3. Keep an eye on them and order them to refuel before they run out (to do this is a huge amount of micro-management and not in any way fun or rewarding)

So please, whatever else people think is a good idea, let's not have limited fuel. If there is limited ammo then perhaps have it more like the original Red Alert: bombers can be ordered on a run, but after one or two passes they automatically retreat to a rearming place. This rearmIng place must not be a building you have to build specially for the task (perhaps each air factory could have a separate pad for rearming bombers for instance).

1. This should be normal for air units. Spending most of their time in a base is completely reasonable. Rather than just have them eternally flying around going pew-pew, I would rather have beastly air units that fly in, unleash hell, and then need to spend some time repairing, refueling, and re-arming.

2. You are looking at old style air units and saying that a fuel system is annoying. Eternal patrol with air pads underneath is just as "weird" as having them sit on alert in a base, and get scrambled when an enemy is detected. The problem with the former approach is that these units are incredibly mobile, and scale vastly better as map sizes increase unless they are tied to the ground somehow.

Using airbases (or carriers) lends significance to ground warfare and naval warfare, for supporting air play in addition to its own purposes. Taking an island might let you project air power around that island, whereas eternally-in-flight planes can project just as much power anywhere, no matter what.

3. I agree that improved automated management of logistics to prevent players manually needing to do these actions for individual units is necessary for this system to work. Having air units automatically return to an assigned home base is actually not a large step.

Just with regard to point 1, I'm talking about the difference between interceptors patrolling your perimeter and acting as a buffer against enemy air-raids, or parked in your base, often unable to respond to a threat in time. This happens a lot in Supcom/FA, and it's a bloody nuisance.

It's a result of smaller distances to move, which causes plane launch time to be too slow to get up in the air before enemy fighters hit. I can understand why they're allowed to always be in the air.

Perhaps a simplified fuel system would work. Airbases project a supply-aura, and planes inside the aura don't use up fuel. This would allow your interceptors to patrol the base without running out of fuel, while still requiring a resource investment or limited flight time when sending out bombers and fighters to engage an enemy base.

How about instead of having planes eternally airborne, they spend most of their time in airbases or carriers. Then, when an enemy is detected within their operational range, they are launched. Rather like firing a missile at an enemy target within its attack range. Only these missiles engage the target by shooting guns at it, and then come back.

Rather than ordering them about the map individually, or by box-selecting the aircraft blobs independently, you control which base they are tied to. The player issues them a move order from base to base.

You might order one of these airbases or carriers to attack an enemy base. It launches its bombers and gunships and whatever else, and they keep going out, dropping bombs, returning, and heading out again, until you order the base to do something else.

Downside of this idea is that this would cause a high response time. The fighters had always to travel some distance between their base and the enemy aircraft. Assuming that aircrafts have some decent range this may take some time. Keeping interceptors and/or air-superiority fighters in hangars while at war, which enemy attacks very likely, isn't the norm. For good reason I think. Bombers maybe, this way you could hide them from your enemy.
Another drawback is that you'd still define what area your fighter defend. Otherwise they'll probably try to kill some enemy aircrafts without taking care of naval/ground AA-forces.

This is mostly a function of how soon you can detect/react the enemy and how fast aircraft take off. Both of these variables can be tweeked. Imagine if interceptors could be launched at high speeds catapult-style, where as all other aircraft would have to launch under their own power. At the very least, this would provide interceptors their own niche when compared against ASFs.

If the issue is about having long term visuals over an area, there's nothing preventing the devs from creating a scout aircraft that could stay airborne for long periods of time.

The aircraft continues on to the next airbase at full speed. This is why I say there will be a 'reserve' supply amount. Basically, if the plane hits empty on supplies, it returns to base and regardless of how far it is, it uses up the supplies in the reserve, and when it arrives the airbase will need enough supplies on hand to refill the reserve and the main tank at the same time (just a small additional cost to flying the aircraft). It's a switch - plane runs out of regular supplies, and says "Ok I'm on reserve, I must return to base" and it starts making its way back and cannot fight.

One of the biggest reasons I suggested a fuel component is because I want players to have to make a choice - pay to have their aircraft circling their base in a patrol, pay to build more airbases to launch their aircraft faster in the event of an attack, or pay to get more scouts and radar up to give themselves a bigger response envelope.

It's a simple matter of telling the player how much scouting / visibility / radar he needs in order to achieve his air superiority in the designated zone.


I would prefer not to give the player individual aircraft control, because if aircraft don't react like tanks when you control them like tanks, it can be frustrating, eg if you were to tell it to return to a location it just flew past, the aircraft would need a large turning circle and then it would do large figure eights to pass over the target.
By removing the specific control you reduce the ability of the player to game the system, and reduce the value of micromanaging the aircraft. Since micro is no longer necessary to win your battles in the air, it frees the player up to spend their time elsewhere.

If we make Air expensive, powerful, fast and with low HP, i do not see why anyone would use "air blobs" that everyone is afraid of. The use of Air blobs won't exist anymore because microing every plane into a cubic foot is the thing Uber hates most.

If aircraft are expensive, you won't be outpouring your economy just on them. Because, air won't have a high staying power. they have firepower and speed, so they can quickly move onto an enemy base and take out key points, at which point you're out of air. But if you took out important targets, you can now move your land in to finish the job.

I am not sure about many of the ideas in this thread, so I will wait to see.

what are your own thoughts on air? when someone says, "air" do you envision air blobs, or?

Well I envision a system based on either WW2 aircraft or coldwar aircraft.

Blobs of aircraft are just flying tanks, and so aren't really what aircraft are supposed to be about.

Aircraft rely on speed to survive, not hp and are proficient as cheap missiles in their role, but of course being more common makes them have more vulnerability's like other aircraft.

But they are totally incapable of holding ground, either due to some resource drain or to reload times making them vulnerable to AA and highly vulnerable to static AAA systems that will murder aircraft who are not traveling at top speed (Loitering).

So aircraft are completely expendable? I don't know about that. It's one thing to expect losses (even heavy losses), but if we're just throwing them away, we might as well just replace aircraft with tactical missiles.

You mean like in real life?

Throwing aircraft at fortified areas might as well be making them expendable.

It doesn't mean aircraft are now tactical missiles, it means that you can treat them like one by throwing them at a defended place. It also means that in order to use them most effectively, use them where the enemy does not have good AA.

Oh, and here I thought we were talking about a game. The point of this thread was to rethink air combat, not remove it.

I think the issue is that the relationship between aircraft and AA are very one dimensional: if you have enough AA you're save, if you don't have enough AA you get steam rolled. It's not like land battles where there is terrain and various ways to attack and defend. The purpose of this thread was to try to provide aircraft a unique niche. Right now they're tanks that ignore terrain. Not only that, but you need a special unit to attack this particular tank.

Making aircraft expensive, powerful, fast and with low HP doesn't change it's relationship with AA. If you can overwhelm AA you'll end up with blobs, if you can't you'll end up with zones completely safe from aircraft.

Requiring aircraft to have some kind of range limit (tied to an airbase in this thread) doesn't inherently fix that problem, but it provides a condition for the use of a powerful unit. In addition, airbases would provide a focal point of combat as well as encourage the use of firebases.

Not neccesarily. "Completely safe" generally means 'Invested too much resource in', after all.
Also, one-hit, slow reload aircraft means that even with limited AA, aircraft can come in to ruin some unit's day, but they won't destroy his whole base because they'll need to recover after their run, giving the opponent time to build more AA.

This means that aircraft are great to open an attack with by taking out strategic targets (that big gun, or base power, or a shield, or whatever) but will never destroy an entire base.

On the other hand, making some AA guns super effective but only available in giant size would mean that the opponent will often have a single major AA gun that keeps an area "safe", but taking it out makes him rely on smaller AA guns that aren't very effective, basically giving him a point of failure that an enemy can exploit.