Rethinking Air Combat

What if u just make very fragile aircrafts wich are NOT cost-effective in fight.
Aircraft wich are just more mobile and got high DPS but die very fast.
OR make some very cost effective Anti Air units with in high tier, splash dmg would work great since air units usually clumb up. So air units are great early and mid game, but not that effektive lategame in big fights, but they still are good for harrasment due to their high mobility.

Honestly I didn't had to refuel a plane in SupCom manually once.

100% agree.

I'd rather call it semi-positional, for the following reason: I assume that a plane will have enough munition to destroy another comparable plane (otherwise the air-fights may be endless since the planes are repaired when rearming), therefore usually only one air-force survives. How long this remaining planes need to rearm isn't that important, since the other force is destroyed. So one air-force can defend every arbitrary far position (nearly) equally well. They might need very long to reload, but thats still less than reloading never (because the others were destroyed).
A fuel limit makes it more difficult to defend positions far away, because there are always some planes some planes refueling. Defending a very far position may result in having only less than 50% of the aircrafts actually defending this position, while the rest is on the way to/from refueling. There might even be air-refueling-tanker (with limited refueling capacities).
Nevertheless limited ammunition (perhaps for every plane) is a good idea, if I only could choose between ammo or fuel, it'd be likely ammo.

This may sound as a nice system against micro, but it removes a lot of flexibility. Attacking multiple target with the same type of aircraft, but different distribution. Setting up different patrol routes with different distribution. Moving aircrafts to new locations("bases").
I also don't appreciate too much if AI controls my units and I have no/small influence on how it moves them (for example over enemy AA) or what targets it destroys ("AA? destroy it, ... wait what carrier/base do these planes belong to?").

Without these stations a usual drop-ship/drop-pod will suffice.

If "independent" means independent from station, why do I need the station at all?

Why limiting the range of land units? I don't think a fuel/ammo system for ground or naval is a good idea.

This heavily depends on the costs of this structures. Assuming ledarsis bases model this might be true, but with SupCom-style fuel system you can transport some engineers to the maximum range of a air-transporter, build a refuel station and easily and cheaply deploy your units all across the planet. Since air-transporters are usually designed to transit vast areas, this might not be necessary unless the planet is gigantic.

I'd rather call the "conventional aircrafts" aircrafts and the "suborbital crafts" satellites. But my ideas for satellites probably belong in the dedicated thread(s).

What was fundamentally broken about Supcom air was the ability to make airblobs.

I think if we remove the ability for air blobs by increasing expenses and reducing HP, as well as making air combat more of a dodge/stealth thing than pure HP (meaning: you can be lucky and get missed a lot or your craft is hit by a lucky shot and pretty much down).
we can make Air less of an "i have a 100 aircraft locust swarm"

Here is something I posted in another thread about a similar topic. All these ideas boil down to micro vs. marco. The indications of the Devs is they are leaning toward macro as micro becomes a nightmare once you get off a single battlefield/planet.


magusk wrote:
Basically, create airfields or carriers.

Have them store aircraft for sorties or for defense.

Then use the airfields to target enemy installations or areas with bombers. Fighters would be the primary defense and would launch to defend against enemy bombers in range (assumedly large). AA units could still be built.

This would allow people to invest in airfields which would count against a unit cap. Each air structure would support a set number of units. If a unit is destroyed, it'll rebuild at a hit for metal/energy automatically up to the ammo limit of the unit.


I really like this idea. We are basically seeing the idea a replacing manned aircraft with far smaller and relativity disposable drones IRL. Replace the air blob-hordes of FA and Supcom 2 with sea and air carriers similar to Protoss Carriers from StarCraft.

Add the option of dedicating them to anti air or anti ground for some more tactical play. Giving them the option of arming the drones with different ammunition and a cool down to prevent instant switching between options.

These massive carriers can slowly make their way to the battle ground and spew forth 10, 20 or even 30 smaller drones to add to the mayhem. When a drone is destroyed the carrier automatically starts to rebuild the missing drone. With an appropriate hit in metal and energy to our economies.

If Uber is thinking of having massive battles on multiple planets and/or moons then we need to start thinking of ways to limit the need for micro and start looking at ways to marco our armies.

This idea can even be applied to ground armies. Rather then building one at a time we build squads of them like in Dawn of War. With the ability to replace destroyed units cheaper at our base rather then building a whole new squad. Say infantry squads of 5 and tank squads of 3.

I posted on another thread but, figured since this one was currently living and the other one might've been necro'd; I'd post one more time. Plus, I'm more awake now.

Make carriers and Airbases units with the aircraft as ammo similar to protoss carriers, hangers in Sins of a Solar Empire, or nukes and antinukes from TA. Forget fuel and ammo.

You build a single structure that will build and maintain a fixed number of units. If they are bombers or anti ground, you select the air field and a target or target area and they will fly to the area and attack. When an airbase is low as planes are destroyed, it automatically creates up to a hard cap of air units.

If they are air superiority fighters, they can be set to protect other airfields or units and will launch as escorts or they can be set for general defense and they'll scramble when enemy air is spotted.

If a base is destroyed while the fighters are out, have them kamikaze on visible enemy troops to get some use out of them or just blow up.

Now, why this model.

1) Planes are fast moving, generally fragile, and trying to micro ammo or fuel for essentially disposible glass cannons is silly. Making better AA units will exacerbate the problem. In TA or SC, against a heavy fortification, you'd throw dozens of scouts and fighters away to give a wave of bombers a chance to drop their bombs and they'd usually die before they got back trying to set up a second run.

2) We are looking to manage multiple battlefields across a system and we need to reduce Micromanagement, not increase it. Can you imagine having to track multiple air force ready levels across multiple battlefields while launching combined sea and ground units at standard RTS speeds?

3) Air units, aside from gunships, were remarkably fiddly in Supcom or TA. They banked to reaquire new targets, went WAY past targets and would take a long time to make a second pass. This is probably realistic but...

4) Having realistic air units adds absolutely nothing to the game other than a checkbox on a features list.

5) Having this model simplifies command and control, probably simplifies programming of air unit and AI logic, but still forces some real strategic decisions about how to allocate a smaller, but still vital, air force.

I'd like to thank Torklan for cross posting me to this thread. I just noticed that he did so while I was writing this.

The question is whether this macro optionally increases your options or forcefully decreases them.

This base idea is neither new nor have you mentioned any new argument for this or against not having such bases.

Yeay, dumbass fighters that launch when it's to late or attack enemy bases because a aircraft was produced :roll:

I'd like to decide when to build myself.

You probably live in the past.

I see the micro.

Is this still a successor of TA/SupCom/FA?

If we keep fuel out of it then bases/carriers are just rearming platforms.

They needn't be tied to them in any other way or should an aircraft be destroyed when the last base or carrier it visited is destroyed. If your opponent destorys all your rearming units then you have an airforce of scouts waiting for a rearming unit to be constructed for which they will all queue up for. Otherwise air units will queue to the nearst with capacity rearming station.

This lets you have stationary airfields, light rearming carriers (airborne and sea), large re-arming/production carriers (airborne and sea) all vulnerable to raids which adds a nice strategic dimension without supply management headaches.

When not on patrol or assigned to a route or attack they just land on the open field as in subcom.

This is the model that C&C 3 used for its docked jets. It worked fine in that game because it's more of a traditional RTS where everything is on more of a tactical scale than strategic scale. In a game like SupCom, where maps are potentially huge and flixibility is king, I'm not convinced it would've been the right solution. I'm also worried that overhauling it like this would lose some of that TA "feel" in terms of controlling your planes.

I think we all agree that we need something a bit more manageable (less required micro) and balanced than what TA/SupCom have. The question is whether we start with the scaled back C&C 3 system and add on features to make it more flexible, or start with the TA/SupCom system and add on features to polish some micro out of it while simultaneously reigning it back.

IMO the TA/SupCom system is the way to go, but it definitely needs help with automation. Eg:

• • Allow aircraft to be selected/ordered normally, but also make them able to inherit orders from the air base they're guarding (repair/supply pad, aircraft carrier, etc).

• • Have factories guarding air bases automatically build replacements for whatever gets destroyed, which inherit the same orders.

• • Make planes smarter about attacking eligible targets on their patrol route that are currently out of their range. This would make creating a patrol route more similar to Pawz's "painting" a patrol zone in the way it actually functions.

Those few things alone would make managing 3 different air forces much simpler. The rest of the problems would have to be fixed with implementation and balancing. Microing Vamps back and forth to make them fire faster is an implementation problem, and invincible gunship swarms are a balancing problem.

In the Macro vs. Micro argument, I am all in favor of removing any details that Micro wouldn't help. Again, I assume unit AI is comparable to SupCom or TA. If you start assuming improved unit AI or different air movement models, then this whole discussion become moot.

Micro stuff:

Placing buildings.

Placing defenses.

Producing scouts/harrassment troops.

Going tanks vs. going infantry for primary expansion/holding terrain.

Establishing infrastructure.

Controlling the direction of advance of my troops and timing of attacks.

I'd actually like to eliminate the whole speeding up factories with engineers and just limit the Commander to helping to allow for effective scouting.

Macro Stuff:

Unified pool of resources across all the planets and an overlay or chart telling me the net income or loss of a planet to identify the relative value of buildings and projects.

Basic defenses such as automated turrets targeting enemy blips while I'm on another planet. Maybe if I build a Tier 3 structure for Coordinated defense structures, as in TA.

Free Roaming Defenders force on the planet to effectively slow down invasions of my moon base while I'm building asteroid mines. (In other words, I want my factories to produce and maintain a small force of troops that will instantly attack any enemy blips on my radars.) If I've captured the entire moon, I don't want to lose it while I'm on another planet.

Now, let's talk about about the primary reasons for my original post and the followup in my second. Again, there was some repetition between the two threads.

First, options. Does removing active control of air from the game impact the micro? Now with the exceptions of Gunships and transports, air units in TA and SupCom are made of glass and when used seemed to almost always be set to create infinite queues that patrolled until you sent them en-mass. They were used as a death blob of 100+ units that was usually sent on a suicide run on the enemy commander or other Target of Opportunity. Considering that during a fight, the air units need to be assigned a target before they get on scene or else they wheel around uselessly as they acquire targets, or start to land if the target was destroyed and you're working on another part of the map; they aren't exactly prone to micro.

In other words, the rank and file aircraft in TA or SupCom were stupid fighters that flew around and died with micro. :roll:

Gunships and transports are different and, if they have to be in the game, I'd recommend they get built in the tier 2 or 3 tank factory. Then you'd control them like standard units, except they'd never land. Again, why make air units land to be shot by enemy infantry?

As an aside, the best destructive force in the TA game aside from the nukes or Commanders was transports and Antimatter bombs. Set the transports to self destruct about 5 secs before they hit the enemy lines and let them literally clear the entire line. Then roll in the tanks and ground troops. Ah good times. :lol:

Granted that was a bit of an exploit but, it was still a fun trick to pull like loading the enemy commander on a transport.

Anyhow, my vision is fairly simple, you build an airbase or naval carrier. It has the facilities to produce Fighters or Bombers. Fighters are good against other planes. Bombers only target ground. Each factory builds only one type but, you can change it out and destroy existing planes, maybe have them Kamikaze on visible enemy troops. The base UI would give 3 switchs, Bombers/Fighters, Rebuild on/off, and Autodeploy Yes/No. On the base, have a light that indicates how full it's facilities are. Red=fewer than 30% Yellow=31-95%, Green for 95-100%. (Numbers subject to change)

If the factory build bombers, they'll produce say 10 or 100 bombers. (Some Hard Cap) When you give them a bombing mission, the bombers launch from the base and fly to the target area. This keeps them off the field until needed. If a bomber is destroyed, the base'll rebuild the bomber if a switch is turned on. If it's off, it won't. If it rebuilds the bomber, it won't relaunch the bomber until a new mission is assigned. Bombers only work well in groups.

If the factory builds fighters, They'll build 10-100 fighters. (Some Hard Cap) they can be assigned to protect an asset such as the commander, a bomber group, or front line troops. Or, they can be free defenders and have them launch at the first sight of visually confirmed enemy air. Again, factory on equals rebuild. Factory off equals don't rebuild. For fighters, I think it's best to redeploy them automatically. Mass of fire isn't quite as powerful given the idiotic swooping that fighters do.

If a base is destroyed, have the ships kamikaze or just blow up.

IMO, one of the biggest problems with the blobs is that the blob was the most optimal way for the aircraft to fly in.

The player didn't intentionally create them, the player just did what the player is supposed to do: IE: Build lots of air units. There's nothing wrong with that and as much as I like the "Airbase deploys independent drones" idea (I really like that idea) it just seems to me like it's punishing the player for doing exactly what the player should be doing.

It seems to me that the solution to blobs is to just make aircraft fly in formation by default when flying alongside other air units. No blobs, no 20 aircraft flying one on top of another in the exact same airspace, just make bombers fly in a box formation and fighters fly in a delta formation. And then have them break to engage in air combat. By not making them want to gravitate toward a blob, aircraft will tend to engage units that are closer to their position in the enemy formation when they encounter one. Meaning actual dogfighting occurs/enemy formations scatter when superior numbers walks all over them.

And by having bombers fly in a box formation, it also reduces the problem of bombers spaghetting when told to bomb a target (resulting in hilariously useless bombers who beeline for a single target and end up forming a nice neat line that gets chewed up by AA).

The way I see it there are two main reasons why players 'blob' their aircraft:

1. Aircraft performed very poorly without constant attention, so it's much easier for the player to manage a single large blob.
2. Aircraft could move from one side of the map to the other very quickly, so it was easy to bring the full force of your airforce against any threat - the flip side being that as an attacker you would be faced by the full air blob of the enemy, so cutting your forces in half would be tactical suicide.

All the suggestions to tweak the balance of aircraft by making them more expensive or fragile fail to address either of these points. Additionally, if you simply add ammo as a supply requirement and leave the rest the same, then you still end up with a giant blob, but the blob has to go home every once in a while. You haven't solved any of the problems, and you just add another layer of complexity to the problem without gaining a benefit.

On the other hand, if we can tie aircraft into a system where the strategic decisions lie not in where your last move order is, but rather the strategy is in setting up your patrol routes and defensive zones and supporting your aircraft with enough ground assets.. then you give the player a reason to spread his aircraft out. Taking direct control away from the player also takes away the big advantage the micro'd planes may have, encouraging a 'set and forget' attitude where the player can depend on his aircraft to do what they need to do as long as he has given them good standing orders.

Also, rather than selecting an airbase and issuing orders, I envision that you would have an 'air planning' UI section so the player can simply click a button: 'defensive air zone', and paint it on the map. Then a list of nearby airbases can pop up, the player clicks one (or two) and voila, air units assigned.
Click on 'Bomb Area', paint a target area, and it brings up a window of airbases and how many bombers you have available. Drag a slider to pick how many bombers you want to send, drag another slider to indicate escort size, and hit 'launch'. Bombers and fighters start launching out of the airbases, gather together at a rally point, and then move out in formation.

Pawz is correct. The primary reason why airblobs work is that they allow you to bring an unlimited quantity of force to bear anywhere.

Without mobility or logistical limitations, there is no reason to spread your forces out over an area. You might as well just put everything all together, and use their speed to go wherever they are needed. Then, the fact that this is possible forces the other player to do the same.

If you can only have a finite number of planes in any particular airbase, then in order to use all your planes in a single area, you would need enough airbases within range of that area to use your entire air force. This gets more difficult as your air force increases in plane count. Under most conditions you are going to have planes spaced across area, depending on where their bases are located.

A single isolated airbase might get defeated by two enemy airbases' worth of planes, even if the owner of the one base owns more aircraft if you just counted them up.

Have fuel, have ammo, make them the exact same thing. We are in a nano-scale production world, where mass and energy are interchangeable. Fuel is used to make energy, and ammo is made from energy.

Tactically, this offers simple truths. The longer the flight time, the less damage the planes can functionally do when they reach their target. Every air factory has a few air refueling pads, and you can build dedicated facilities. Aircraft then are free-form control, but have practical range limitations. Assuming that fueling takes a certain amount of time, we have limits to the amount of planes that actually function out of any one area--a limit we can increase, with a cost.

Blobs will only happen with a massive buildup of fueling pads, especially if you insure that planes always use fuel, so no one-shot death blob can be made.

Fuel being tied to ammo also can help balance range issues, making it easier to fight close to your fueling base, and harder to fight further away, much as actual air combat is.

I think making are more complex just makes them unused.

The core of the problem is: death blobs.

The solution is: make death blobs not work. And this can be as simple as balancing it through cost, or AI/coding (not allowing them to come closer to eachother than X distance)

Forced distance or reduced amount of aircraft = no death blobs. Especially if flak AA is actually made effective against death blobs like one would expect

Rather than globally nerfing air units out of sheer terror, how about fixing some problems with land? The problem with air having long range, is nowhere near as troubling as land units that can not fight long distance.

There need to be adequate ways of moving ground units across long distance and past defenses. As long as those tools exist, then a ground unit's higher power will naturally prevail over a theater that pays a mobility tax on every unit.

Forced range does not change the nature of death blobs. If anything it makes the situation worse, because the restricted units have to be more effective to justify their limited range. For example, a supcom 2 air force would be pretty damn OP on huge maps without a leashing station.

Just like anything else in the game, long range and flying is not something that can be given to units for free. A huge flaw in the Supcom titles is that they took two identical chunks of mass, gave one massively improved speed, damage, and obstacle avoidance, and called it air. It was fundamentally flawed from the start.

TotalA was much better about air power in general. Flying units were fast, fragile, and had far less firepower than their ground counterparts. That's exactly how a fast unit should work, no matter what its theater of war is. Bombers were a nightmare to use, so it was difficult to see if they were OP or not.

I agree with bobucles' post above. Forcing a distance between air units is a pathetically weak solution.

I don't think making air units positional is a nerf, however. If anything I would support making them considerably stronger, and introducing more interesting limitations than just being weak.

Another possible approach to take is to make air units have a higher individual price point than land units. Where a common tank might cost 100 metal, a common plane might cost 500 or 1000, with significantly more power to match. This larger chunk size combined with their high speed and relative fragility gives air units a much less stable risk/reward dynamic.

I think we need to have a thread about sizes and ranges generally. Close combat land units should have very short ranges, but long-ranged land units should have much longer ranges than most other unit types, except certain kinds of ships. This includes artillery, missiles, anti-air, etc. Ground units in general get more range than comparable air units, but obviously have much less speed, so their effective reach is obviously much less. Certain air units might have longer-ranged weapons, such as guided missiles, that give them special weapon reach, at the cost of some disadvantage, such as being a slow, low-flying gunship or tactical missile defense interception, or both.

Ideas please. I realize air transports are on option, but you have to realize that by doing so, you're bringing the underpowered theatre of war up to balance by meshing it with the overpowered theatre of war. It would be nice if it could stand on it's own.

I'm not familiar with all the TA derivatives and remakes, but OTA saw hawk/vamp swarms end just about every match. So it depends if "TotalA" was one of those derivatives.

The core contingency expansion pack added AOE flak for tier 2 to combat this.

Before flak cannons, gunships were the go to unit to destroy everything (another air unit; surprise). After flak, people turned to the advanced air fighters (hawk/vamp). So yes, the specific air unit changed, but it was still an air unit.

That's because the shell was too slow, just like in SupCom.

What we need is good sniper AA, that is easy to overwhelm and AOE AA that heavily punishes loitering or grouping over bases.

I vote for big AAA missiles that are designed to kill large air clumps.