Some SC derived suggestions/ideas

I've been playing a lot of Supreme Commander lately and I've had a few ideas I feel I have to get on here:

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Aircraft ideas:
In SCFA aircraft had a LOT of health. I can understand wanting to increase the survivability of aircraft from SC but I feel a different more realistic approach to aircraft survival would have made them feel less like flying boulders (imo) and I hope something like this can be used in PA:

Instead of giving aircraft lots of health give them defensive abilities like real aircraft. I'm thinking stuff like flares, afterburners, and radar jamming. The more survivable and aircraft is supposed to be the more and better abilities it would have.

Combine this with dogfighting AI smart enough to do things like drawing an opponent over friendly AA to shake them off and I feel air battles in PA would be much more engaging than the ones in it's precursors.

On a more strategic scale I was thinking about the "flow fields" being used for pathfinding. Could those be used to make aircraft automatically steer clear of AA emplacements? Make each known AA like a "hill" for aircraft pathfinding so they have an inclination to fly around AA if possible or at least take a path with the least coverage.

This would cut down on micro a bit, make the planes seems a lot smarter, and decrease the occasional irritation of having numerous aircraft cut down by an easily avoided AA gun while you were focusing on something else.

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Orders:

In addition to my hope for "orders as first class entities" (http://planetaryannihilation.wikia.com/wiki/Orders_as_First-Class_Entities_(OFCEs)) to be a thing in PA, I was wondering about the possibilities of orders having the option to be located in reference to a unit instead of the ground.

For instance you could command scout bots to patrol an area in front of your main army or large experimental type unit so when the reference unit (the army/exp) moves or turns the bots would change their patrol pattern accordingly.

Something like this would allow for an incredible range of support commands like having arty units follow right behind you in a block, having AA and tanks surround you in a circle to defend you, and having scout planes patrol a large area around you for intel.

This might be harder to do than say setting up clever formations but I think the freeform aspect would make this a valuable ability to have. Combine this with area commands and you might even be able to set up something like a rolling arty barrage to clear the front of an advancing army.

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And finally immersion:

Immersion isn't really a word I see much in reference to strategy games but I feel it could be a very valuable aspect of a game like this. Your commander is you. I think this is a very interesting concept that if pushed right could give this game a very unique feel. This could be accomplished in a lot of ways but here are my ideas:

When something affects your commander you should feel it no matter where your camera is pointing. if you fire your gun maybe have a light shudder effect around the edges of the screen and a gun reload sound or some such.

When you take damage it should feel and hear like something just slammed into you with the effect depending on what hit you.

Announcements involving the commander should use personal language, instead of "commander has taken heavy damage" it should be more like "heavy damage sustained". Perhaps even have a completely different voice for the commanders Betty (like the strategy "program" is separate from the commander itself).

Perhaps when you zoom out on the map far enough the screen could go slightly transparent showing a first person view from your commanders head? Or a small minimap like window you can open to display your commanders view (or perhaps the view from whatever unit you have selected and it defaults to the commander.)

I think it should really feel like you are inside that giant mech stomping around, instead of it just being another unit for you to give orders to. When it dies I want it to feel like I died, not just the king of my chess match.

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Ok that's it I hope these ideas have been worth the time it took to read them. (And write them lol)

Aircraft were definitely a bit to HP heavy in Supcom and adding defensive flares would make them more interesting to use. However, I think making them automatically avoid AA units would be too much.

Also, I really like your Immersion ideas. Adding a "Commander View" would be a nice addition.

I dont mind some immersion features, but rember that the player isent a pilot inside the commander, he is the commander robot (Humanity no longer exists).

So the immersion features should keep that in mind (Would a robot hear thuds when hit for example? or would its sensors simply warn it?).

Having the screen flicker or distort alittle when the commander is hit could be cool if its done right (power fluctuations).

Anti-X weapons, at their simplest, create a linear decrease in enemy weapon power. Less incoming damage means an exponential increase in survivability. Death blobs become more deathly as every craft has their own defense system to mess things up. Spreading fire would be catastrophic, as each craft needs their defenses overwhelmed before they can be taken down.

Basically, it's like giving personal shields to all aircraft. Ponder on that for a bit.

This sounds sexy! I like it. Just listening to the sounds of battle, and all of a sudden something's clanging on the armor.

I feel like a aircrafts ability to evade should be their defence.

Only if that is optional. I dont want such fps s***. What is next then dof? Water on screen when it rains, motion blur?
I dont want that. :x

Do a Barrel Roll!

The only time it can ever happen is when you're losing. Considering the importance of the Comm, being instantly aware of its status is kind of a good idea.

Actually, DoF can be done tastefully in an RTS. The trick is to make sure it only shows up when zoomed in close on something.

I agree for the first point, making individual ais is good and fun to watch combat is also good. Careful though, don't want to be too heavy handed on what the cpu has to crunch per unit otherwise uber will resort back to dice-rolling like every goddamn RTS or TBS on the face of the earth except TA, supcom also Starcraft but stracraft has life-bars though every shot is homing.

As for the first class entity orders I'm sorry but no, no way. What you're missing here is that base building and eco harass has to pay off. If you only lose the engineer, all you have to do is heavy-hand on them have your bank of engies within grasp and send the next one to go continue the suicide work underneath the nasty bomber. The engie harass strategy would die out.

Countering this is completely doable, and requires you to give a small part of your attention for a little while, a reasonable price to pay and a polite and acknowledging answer to your opponent who just wanted to say hi. Don't be rude, give him a reply.

Out of the two strategies I find the second smarter more elevated and whatnot.

Templates will save you the hassle of loosing your beautifully orchestrated patchwork that would have won you an international award for respectable artist.

As for the being inside the cockpit idea, I really like the idea I don't care if it was supposed to be a robot the lore wasn't established yet, and personally I'd relate to it more if it was a human so that's really a good idea.

I'd like to see some cleverer defences out of aircraft as well. Currently RTS focuses heavily on straight up AD x armour penalty* = HP decrease. With aircraft I'd like to see weapons that will instantly crush a plane but with the ability to dodge. So say a plane has an evasion pool. When it successfully dodges the evasion pool drops down and reduces evasion chance. Then it will recharge all the while it isn't dodging. Make it a relatively fast recharge.

This gives a more interesting dynamic for planes. Suddenly you are faced with the need to overload a planes evasion pool rather than mass damage on it. Duals can possible end quickly or not at all if both planes keep regening their pool. You now also have more room to escort bombers. A flight of escorts can make life more miserable for the interceptors. Whereas unescorted bombers are suddenly in serious danger because interceptors can take them down quickly.

It could even be expanded upon by altering the accuracy rating of fighters depending on if they are targeted or not. Stealth fighters could get guaranteed accuracy but would obviously be expensive.

*sometimes with different armour and AD types.

That's actually similar to how I was thinking about it. It's another way to balance aircraft survivability. I'm not saying all aircraft should have this to an insane degree or anything but it seems like a better option to increase say, an advanced fighter's, ability to survive other than just tacking on more health.

I absolutely agree. I was thinking at the time of writing the original post that this would not be feasable because 1: it would take too much processing power and 2: there wouldnt be enough room. Now I don't really know about 1 but I realized that 2 was mainly from my supcom oriented conceptions, so push aircraft quite a bit highe than supcom and maybe give them the ability to evade in a vertical fashion (dives and climbs) and this could work and look badass to boast.

First off, I want the engine to be capable of OFCE that doesn't mean that everything has to use it. The main thing I would want to use it for are ferry routes (if ferrys are used) and patrols. I want to be able to set up a patrol as an independent object and then have the output of a factory automatically assign units to it and if they all die I want to be able to easily assign new units to it and move on.

Secondly, I don't see why the "engi harass strategy" has to be viable in PA. This is a new game with a much larger focus and just because it was important in supcom (never played TA) doesn't mean it has to work here.

Finally, I think even if the build orders were persistent, that strategy would still pay off. The engineers and unprotected buildings would still be destroyed, it would still require area protection to gain economically from the area, it would still tie up factory time and resources building those engineers, as well as engineer time and resources to construct the doomed buildings. The only thing this would change is that it would remove the irritation of having to redo all your carefully laid plans which I think would only benefit the game.

I play these games for the strategy and designing custom defense installations for the specific circumstances and such is a part of that, but having to redo it because the only copy of the construction plan was loaded on the engineer that just took a random arty shell to the face isn't fun to me. Plus it doesn't make much sense to me: if I am in a bot (or am a bot) capable of coordinating the strategy for entire planets, I should damn well have a program capable of remembering what I told an engineer to do so i can send more to do the same thing.

I think the game should be focused on competing strategies not exploiting the weaknesses of the UI. Therefore I think the UI should be quite powerful.

(didn't want to quote the whole post, it's just above this one anyway)

This is a clever idea imo but I have trouble imagining how it would work with PA since weapons fire is handled by ballistics instead of dice rolls. (perhaps the aircraft does a quick dodge if it's about to be hit?) I think the idea of overwhelming the defensive ability is good though and would work well with point defenses at least as far as missile based AA goes.

But aircraft already have the best self defense tool around. They're fast.
There's literally a direct connection between an aircraft's speed and its ability to stay alive:
1) They are free to choose battles. If an enemy is too much, just run away.
2) They can retreat for repairs, something that other units can not feasibly do. TA and Supcom had air support pads just for this purpose.
3) They can avoid most forms of enemy fire by simply being impossible to hit. Even dedicated AA weapons had a hard time hitting the fastest aircraft.

Evasion did exist in previous titles. It was possible for weapons to miss, and the faster an aircraft was, the better it could avoid fire. I don't think an explicit system will be needed.