Rethinking Air Combat

I'll grant that this is a good idea, it's not the only good idea. I'm interested in airbases because it links the relatively uninteresting air component (where you build, launch, and hope for success), with the much more interesting ground component (namely, gaining and holding territory).

They won't be 100% expendable that way, because the factor "speed" would actually matter.

Air combat would be much more about evading those deadly missiles than being able to withstand heavy firepower.

I generally see AA as 3 distinct types:

-low-tech direct fire. Your cheap AA that's not particularly strong or effective but also doesn't make your base super-vulnerable

-Flak. area-of-effect. good against groups, greater chance to hit aircraft

-Guided. fires missiles that track. (in case you played FA: bombers would commonly drop their payload before they actually got hit due to speed).

maybe things like flares could be counted in, or having Stealth as a hit chance modifier.

What this means is that aircraft would not be one-hit-units, but also wouldn't allow grand blobs of air menace to act as a locust swarm. Since speed actually matters, base defence commonly works to stop long-term harrassment, but commonly fails to actually intercept aircraft before delivering their payload. (which is what air patrol is for).


And yes: this means that dedication is probably out of the window. You'll want either Land to soften up the enemy before moving in Air or vice versa. Since there are no bubble shields, it's a perfectly viable tactic to use Air to blow up powerful anti-ground defenses before the armies roll in to finish the job.


Again: there are no bubble shields, which makes building-sniping an actual tactic. no more "layers of AA protected by shields". layers of AA = easy picking. better AI means that air will definitely be able to split themselves into squadrons and take out loads of AA at once. Making are come in waves might actually make sense now.


The above would not count for Gunships since they actually are pretty much floating tanks.

I don't see how this encourages using ground units. It would make more sense to soften up his AA so you can send even more aircraft.

I think it'd help to distinguish between the fast and slow types of aircraft. TotalA did this fairly well. Lightning fast interceptors and raiders could hit anything, and were difficult to handle without dedicated AA. They were also brutally fragile and fairly expensive, with low overall damage output. Gunships were slower, had thicker armor, and more firepower. AA was excellent, but regular vehicles could take their shots and do fairly well.

In Supcom you had very hard lines between air and ground units. This created a partial issue with gunships. Being unable to hit interceptors wasn't a problem, but it was a bit silly when tanks sat there, dumbfounded by the gunships sweeping in front of their face. Since pure AA was the only counter, flak tanks had to be exceptionally good or you'd be screwed. So it created problems on both sides, where gunships could kill infinite tanks and a handful of flak could kill infinite gunships.

Supcom did have unique icons for interceptors and gunship units, but did not really test them out as a separate unit class with different counters. On the ground, only flak units could take care of things, and they took care of everything. Except ASFs. But to be fair, everything had a hard time against ASFs.

Pawz's proposed system is very similar to the way one of the Command & Conquer games handled jets (C&C 3 I think?). You'd build a runway and hangars, and then you could either put a fighter jet on patrol in an area or equip it with bombs and pick a target to bomb. Patrolling fighters had a small number of missiles, and bombers would drop their entire payload at once and then return for resupply. Also in the same game were hovering gunships/helicopters which were controlled more like hover tanks, but still needed resupply often. Gunships were also pretty high cost and low hp, so losing half your gunship fleet was a big loss.

I like this system because it puts a lot more forethought and tactics into deciding when and where to use your strike jets. You could still build a gunship swarm, but you couldn't keep them fielded 95% of the time due to the significant time spent resupplying and repairing them.

I'm not sure Pawz's system is 100% there, but it's a good start to solving a lot of problems.

Air factory's being like static hangers?

C&C 3 had 2 classes of aircraft.

The gunship was your standard flying tank. Some were faster, some were tougher, and some were transports. The Scrin had some extremely large and lethal craft. Gunships were always airborne and had unlimited ammo.

The other variant was the parked aircraft. These craft were incredibly fast, had limited ammo, and special abilities to pierce enemy defenses. Their typical use was to go in for half a second, unload, and retreat for repair/resupply. Parked aircraft spent 90% of their time on the ground.

The scrin variant was a parked gunship. It had gunship-like stats, extreme endurance, and no need to reload. Mostly, it was just a way to limit the number Scrin strike craft, as they already had the most flying gunships.

Ok so you have a better memory than I do.

I wonder if a similar affect couldn't be achieved by just giving SupCom style aircraft limited ammo that needs to be resupplied, and doing the rest with number balancing? Giving gunships 30 seconds of ammo and a "go home" button seems like a great way to start reigning the system in without scrapping it entirely.

To be fair, we haven't seen a TA/SupCom style air system with a resource system in place that actually restricts it, so a full overhaul may not be necessary. I'd be interested in testing this before it's sent into overhaul mode.

Off topic: land units could be subjected to the same limited ammo system, with a natural regen on it making them fire slower when out of ammo. This would introduce a new layer of decisions to make when using land units in normal combat. Maybe I can build this into a mod...

For all aircraft? Nah. It's not something every aircraft really needs.

It does sound like a good trait for specialty planes. Some craft might be lightning fast or have big alpha strikes(bombers) or simply be hard to defend. A limited ammo supply can help keep air damage on a leash, increasing the time between air raids and using their high speed to its fullest.

But how do you refill and repair hundreds of craft that need constant resupply? Air pads are painfully slow as craft have to stop, drop, rearm and lift off again. A faster method is required.

Fortunately, F-Zero gives us an excellent solution for the volatile "gotta go fast" lifestyle. I present to you: The repair pad. No slowing down, no parking, no VTOL required. Just dive down and rearm and you're good to go. They accept E-ZPass only. If one pass isn't enough, then do two or three.
One big "advantage" is that air power gets a more direct connection to ground facilities. Without the facilities, air units lose out on long term use. With inadequate facilities, huge numbers of air units become unmaintainable. That's good for the really fast ones that have few counters.

Slower aircraft can just have more counters. Gunships could be weak against missiles, flak, and interceptors. Even basic units can join in as gunships like to fly low and in your face.

Why is a faster method required? The whole point is to make this burn time between strikes. If a gunship has to sit there for 10 seconds resupplying, then that's that much more time the swarm spends at home. This is the same thing as making them fly through multiple repair pads to get resupplied, but with more investment in infrastructure required. I think we're essentially on the same line of thinking on this, though.

Sorry Pawz, the more I think about this the more I think we just need to work on solving some problems with the existing system.

The TA or SupCom style free-form air unit is fundamentally limited in their capability by the extreme mobility and flexibility of those units. When I say limited, I mean the game must make these units weaker. I am not saying anything about suggesting nerfs or buffs- these effects are already accounted for in these games' existing design.

An aircraft that is leashed to an airbase doesn't have these same limitations imposed on its capabilities. They can be much, much better because they cannot go wherever they want. I'm talking a single wing of air support that makes a pass on a tank column, and wipes it out in a single pass. I'm talking strategic bombers that drop hundreds of bombs over a huge area; literally carpet bombing.

These kinds of designs are outrageous to give to such fast units that can go anywhere they please without limit. The player would never build anything else; the ground war would be meaningless, building ships would be a waste of resources.

Imagine World War II if planes had unlimited flight time. Nobody would bother to build ships, nobody would bother to train infantry or build tanks. Build planes, and fly them directly from the factory in Georgia all the way to Germany or Japan. No need to muck about with aircraft carriers, defending aircraft carriers with other ships, nothing. No need to capture land, no need to build anything except more ability to produce planes, and it doesn't even matter where it is located. There would be no need for anything except making damn sure you have more planes than the enemy.

TA and SupCom solve this problem in two ways. Firstly, (and most significantly) small maps. I want an air system that allows maps of ARBITRARY size, while still creating dynamic gameplay using land, sea, air, and other types of units. The best way to do this is to leash planes to support assets like airbases and carriers.

Secondly, weak planes. Pound for pound, planes have (even in TA and SupCom) less HP and dps than land and sea units. Making planes dependent on support, creating positionality for air units, and limiting capacity using assets which cost, allows individual planes to get a lot more powerful, and to become FAR more powerful for cost since some cost is absorbed by support assets that should endure even if you lose planes.

Now, I am of the opinion that fragile planes are interesting because it makes air combat faster, with higher stakes, and contrasts it with a more gradual ground war with more expendable individual units. So, the best way to beef up planes is to make them deal WAY more damage, and potentially increase their flying speed as well.

Planes can fly in and instantly unleash HELL when used right, but are expensive and can get destroyed instantly as well. And not just based on anti-air's presence or absence. Clever play can allow air units to operate effectively even with significant anti-air using long-ranged missiles, countermeasures, stealth, low or high-altitude, etc. Air units play fast, and air unit confrontations are over quickly in any case, which creates a quite different style of gameplay compared to ground fighting, which has defined, shifting battle lines as territory changes hands and forces move about slowly. Which, due to ground-based anti-air, produces a shifting picture of the air board as well.

Flying back to base burns time between strikes, which is pretty punishing as is. It gives time for alpha strike weapons to recharge, for damage to be repaired, and for defenders to be moved.

Pads slow things down with lengthy repairs, which is obnoxious when the first priority is to get everything rearmed. The quick pad does that and lets damaged units stick around for full repairs.
If you're confused on how the F-Zero repair pad works, it goes like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-ba7wrrxFk
There's no slowing down and much less risk of a unit becoming interceptor food.

You can do leashing on fast units strictly with ammo. A unit that runs dry has to return to base, effectively reducing its damage. A longer return trip means that more damage is lost.

Slower air units already suffer from being slow. They would not have the same concerns for balance.

I just don't see the point of the F-Zero pad.

Why not just have the aircraft land, or dock inside a base or carrier, within which they cannot be interceptor food? Or even just disallow anti-air from shooting planes sitting on the ground, or on ground pads?

These disadvantages you list are some of the reasons why planes get to be so much stronger if they are required to be leashed to bases, and if they have limited fuel and ammo. Let us assume for the sake of argument planes have the same DPS, but have to spend a lot of time flying back and forth, and refueling/rearming. More damage in a hurry when they are shooting.

The disadvantages you list are also counterplay, which has counter-counterplay by the player using the aircraft. For example, you use "alpha strike weapons" to refer to powerful weapons with long cooldowns- the requirement of air units to strike and leave gives these weapons a huge functional difference from constant-fire anti-air.

Yes, you can leash with ammo, and it's a big improvement over totally independent aircraft. But note that an ammo-only leash is substantially different from a fuel leash, or both.

For example, you might get a giant flock of aircraft and deliberately fly some huge distance away without shooting and then unload. They could snipe almost any target en masse (especially commanders), or they can just lay waste to everything, and aircraft can peel away from the blob as they run out of ammo.

The ammo limitation is good, but it isn't necessarily a positional leash. A group of planes could still project power anywhere on the map- you are just limiting the amount of power they can project within a finite amount of time. It is possible to overcome this power-quantity limitation with just a ridiculous amount of planes.

A fuel limitation scales perfectly with the number of planes. Ten planes use ten times as much fuel to fly as a single plane, meaning the effective range is the same regardless of the quantity of planes.

While I don't mind Pawz idea, to me it feels too complicated. It seems that the controls are very different and vary way too much from how planes have been controlled in previous games in this genre.

In my opinion, a simpler solution that doesn't diverge too much from Pawz's vision would be to have buildings that project air space (i.e. a zone where planes can operate freely). Your controls would be such that you can order planes to attack, move, patrol etc within this zone, and outside the zone you can't give the planes any orders. So you can protect your territory quite easily, just build these buildings, but find it difficult to easily move your airforce outside this zone (without say stealth drops that build an "air-space" building near the enemy base). This would in turn make land more effective, as to secure additional air space, you need to capture it with land first.

If one of these buildings is destroyed while you have planes in the area, then the planes automatically retreat to another zone (so a good way to mount a land offensive would be to snipe these buildings).

If no zones are available, then the planes land and do not function.

IMHO, the things that should project these zones are:

Air Factory (all variants of)
Commander
Air Repair pad or equivalent (this building would be much cheaper and more fragile than an air factory and only acts as a air space zone building).
Aircraft carriers

not sure if it came across properly, but this is precisely what i meant.

As far as I understand ledarsi (sadly I sometimes don't) I somehow agree with him. I'd rather stay at the fuel system and expand it with a armor recharge.
Some things I don't like about these air controlling base/building are:
-Ground only-weapons can "destroy" aircrafts
-All aircrafts would have the same range, giving them different ranges is only plausible if the had to refuel instantly after reaching the maximum range, but then it's just the same situation as with refuel-platforms
-Credibility. What logical reason makes kbots able to travel autonomous across a whole planet and planes unable to move out of a circle? I admit that it may sometimes be necessary to have non-credible situations, but I'd like such situations as much as possible. Note that this non-credibility doesn't result from comparison with reality, but from comparison within this future scenario.

The problems with fuel in SC/FA was somehow that most units have to much. You nearly never see a ASF refueling, therefore you could them move around the whole map as you desire. I would like to reduce the amount of fuel, so you want them to be near a refuel station, otherwise they'll always oscillating between their position and the refuel-station. But you still have the possibility to move them further away if the situation makes it necessary. This could also increase the variety of units, so for example there is a interceptor with few fuel (=low range) but very strong and fast and a slower medium-ranged, weaker ASF. If you want to protect your base use first, if protecting something further away use second.
As mentioned before ammunition-recharge (one some aircrafts) makes long-ranged attacks less effective and therefore the usage of for example aircraft-carriers much more interesting.

The somewhere previous mentioned idea of "drawing" area defense zones is in my opinion very interesting, since in SupCom it sometimes occurred, that patrolling fighters didn't engage enemy aircrafts, because they "missed" them (they were on another section on the patrol route and you had to micro them to attack).

Yes, it's quite different. A fuel leash sucks. It requires constant maintenance from a player, for no reason, even during peace time. No game has done limited fuel properly, and it makes no sense to have an air force that can't reach long distance.

The leashing station does nothing to address how combat can exist across large maps or between worlds. A super powerful air force can become broken all on its own, by hopping leash stations across the map into your opponent's base. Or it can become completely broken in a different way, by making air invasion impossible on enemy worlds. What happens if the leash stations are destroyed? Does your entire investment become worthless? Do you suddenly lose control over them while they find a new station? Having your entire fleet survive or evaporate based on a singular station is retarded.

An ammo leash is much simpler. Any aircraft can hit anywhere. When they run out of ammo, the damage stops and they have to retreat. Rearming can be automatic (but painfully slow), demand a risky move(like touching down), or have special pads that quickly return them to action. It could be all 3.

Any way you cut it, an ammo limited unit is placing its damage output on a leash, limiting its ability to score infinite kills.

Commander balance is a concern unique to Commanders. If they can't survive the harsh realities of total war, then they don't deserve the title as the "ultimate unit" for the job.

For everything else, being sniped is a way of life. Whether the snipe pays off or is a huge waste of money is a matter of tactics.

But the power limitation is positional. The aircraft are directly less capable of raids and long term damage based on their distance from home. They become easier to defend by local aircraft, which get more chances to resupply and strike back. It is a natural defender's advantage, for a type of aircraft that is normally too fast and high flying to care about defense.

Aircraft that are easier to defend don't have the same problem. Gunships and the like can naturally have longevity while being having limited ability to avoid anti air systems.

To be fair, anything is possible when you have more resources than the opponent. And this happened in TotalA fairly often. How did players deal with them? With surprising ease. Fast and furious swarms tend to disintegrate when the slightest bit of splash damage gets in the picture and everything shoots up.

Very good point. I will concede that no RTS has done fuel properly. Except in turn-based games, logistics in general really has not been done well.

An RTS will need a novel UI and AI system to minimize micromanagement. One possible approach is abstracting plane control upwards by having players typically control airbases/carriers, and usually not issue orders to individual planes. Ordering a carrier to air strike a target or shoot down an enemy launches a suitable squadron of planes.

However I think this extra work is well warranted. As the scale of the game increases, this kind of limitation becomes far more important. PA wants to be able to have arbitrarily large planets- as large as your computer can handle. Well there are gameplay requirements to designing the game to be functional. And limiting the independence of aircraft is critical to prevent large planets from simply being air blobs just for the mobility when the distances are large. A well-designed air system with fuel and ammo limitation will exhibit the same local behavior regardless of map scale- but the scale and spread of the war increases to fill the available space as both/all players put assets everywhere under their control.

Exactly. You need to hop airbases across the map towards your opponent's base. That is the point. And so does your opponent.

As a direct consequence, air becomes positional. Controlling or denying territory can deny enemy air operations or reduce their effective firepower as they spend more time traveling and less time shooting. Capturing territory can open up new tactical options for locations you can attack with air units, possibly forcing countermoves, or the construction of extensive anti-air.

It creates a huge strategic significance for aircraft carriers as they are MOBILE AIR BASES, which can be used to put air power in otherwise unreachable locations. And the significance of carriers adds significance to other naval play, including submarines, cruisers, battleships, destroyer screens, and so on.

For starters, I am somewhat certain aircraft cannot actually fly through space on their own. You are probably going to need some sort of specialized space transport to move planes to an enemy world.

Second, if your bases are destroyed, you need to pull your planes out of the area because you can no longer sustain air operations in the area for much longer. Your investment in the base that was just destroyed is indeed gone- just like everything else that gets blown up.

I agree that the very strong AI associations between planes and bases are potentially problematic. Planes should remain independent units. They just have a temporary home base. If the airbase is destroyed, any birds in the air become totally independent. If there are nearby airbases with empty slots, planes needing resupply might claim a spot.

I completely agree with your analysis of the ammo limitation. In fact, if I had to choose only ammo limit or only fuel limit, I would agree with you and choose the ammo limit for the reasons you specify, including that an ammo leash is more discrete, intuitive, and simple, and that it is less likely to frustrate players than having birds run out of go-juice.

However I am of the opinion that both is the best solution. Yes, it is more complicated than just having one limitation. However the significantly increased depth justifies the small complexity increase.

It is quite important that there be an actual distance limitation imposed on units with such high speed. Not just reduced effectiveness with distance (as with an ammo-only solution) but an actual hard leash in order to get a system which scales arbitrarily. Any scale above the scope of a hard leash does not matter from the local perspective.

As an example, suppose a plane has a 1000 km operational range. It can reach anywhere within 1000 km of its base, and still return to the same base, or go 2000 km one-way. From the local point of view of that base, it is irrelevant if the map around it is 5000x5000 or 500,000x500,000 kilometers. Planes' effectiveness outside their reach using bases is zero.

However with only an ammo limit, every base has at least a small amount of influence everywhere, regardless of its position. While a huge improvement over fully independent planes due to the diminished effectiveness with distance, the value isn't zero at extreme distances, out to arbitrary distances. In fact, after a certain distance, planes' power stops dropping with further distance. With an ammo limit, you get the ability to project at least a little bit of power over a HUGE area- the entire map. Which means as maps get larger, you become increasingly incentivized to skew towards planes. At some quite large map size, even with an ammo limit, you are still going to be only producing aircraft and blobbing them together. Albeit at a much larger map size than with totally independent planes.

Interesting analysis, ledarsi. However, I think you're approaching things from the wrong angle, and because of that you're missing a very important point. All these limitations on air units to hold them back are pointless, when the real problem is that land units can't attack!

You are correct that the game must account for arbitrarily large scales. Your extreme examples are practically dyson rings in terms of scale. What is game breaking is having land units that are incapable of crossing those distances. If land units(and naval units) can not cross vast distances, then the entire land theater is unusable and broken on large worlds.

This is where two major features come into play. The first one is "mass transit". Things like transports and unit cannons are explicitly made to shuffle land units around the map at frightening speeds. Orbital insertion and 2-way teleporters allow units to cross vast gulfs of dead terrain in a short time.

In the meantime, you need a unit type that can deal some kind of damage, or the entire interim is a dry, dull tech race. That design fits perfectly into a fast air unit. You can attack enemy transit options to restrict his motion while increasing your own, or buy time while building up unit cannons for a full scale map grab. By restricting ammo, it emphasizes that fast air, while excellent at range, is made explicitly for raiding and not for flattening bases.

If distances are so vast that not neither transit nor air units can feasibly reach the enemy, then you are simply too far away. You can't hurt him, and he can't hurt you. So the solution is simple. Get up closer and build another base!

Well considering that even the smallest maps in PA should probably fall into the category of "build a base closer" I think you might actually be right about needing the option to reach out and touch someone. And you are right that air units are the most logical candidate to fill that role.

Alright. How about this as a concept; we split planes into two categories of craft. Conventional aircraft and suborbital craft. Possibly fusing this distinction with a low/high altitude distinction.

Conventional aircraft are airbreathers. They are much smaller and cheaper, and don't have the ability to fly in space. They're stuck on the planet they were built on, unless you load them in a space transport. They have fuel and ammo limitations, and are tied to airbases/carriers. For combat purposes, these planes are far more efficient than suborbital craft, as they are packing more weapons and less generators and engines.

Suborbital craft are basically aircraft that are also spaceships. They contain large internal power generation capabilities sufficient for indefinite engine operation, and thus can cross arbitrarily large distances in space, and can travel from planet to planet. Coincidentally, this also gives them unlimited operational range within a single planet.

Suborbital craft are much larger and more expensive, as they need to pay for the ability to travel through space to other planets. Suborbital dropships might carry units from one planet to another. Suborbital bombers might drop bombs from space, well above the reach of normal anti-air. These birds could also afford to be a bit tougher and with more weapon mounts than smaller aircraft, but are far squishier and weaker for cost.

The suborbital craft ignore fuel, and could have either limited or unlimited ammo on certain weapons. This allows you to, with a large investment, have unlimited reach with certain types of planes. However these suborbital craft would need to be sufficiently expensive that suborbital air blobs simply don't work without an overwhelming resource advantage- much as experimental blobs don't work (but they don't have to be THAT expensive to get the same effect). You get less bang for your buck, and far fewer suborbital craft. And they would get demolished in a resource-fair fight despite being individually stronger.

PA might even have suborbital capital ships. Now there's an idea. Capable of traveling between planets, but once it arrives it is treated like a very high-altitude SHIP instead of a squishy plane.

We might even have suborbital aircraft carriers. A huge spaceship capable of storing hundreds of suborbital craft.

We might even call it a Battlestar.