The possible future of Planetary Annihilation general gameplay ...

hovercrafts are meant to fill in roles were neither ships nor vehicles can get to and aircraft is not efficient enough ... and i am not just speaking about a single unit or 2 but minimum 5
a fabber, a riptide or blazetype like from supcom .. a missileswarm launching artillerytype similar to the howercraft in cnc then a laser or gun aa or even a antiorbital hovercraft and a big transport also the smaler hovercrafttypes should be transportable by orbital transports

and no i am not referencing just that one thread but many more similar topics came up ... again the thread focuses on content that allows being flexible whithout making any part of the game be redundand

Really like the orbital teleporter idea

Bigger planets means better hardware AND better performance. Experimentals in tiny plannets will not work well (at least I think)

well giantlandvehicle with 4 triple howizer turrents ist not something you could put on a radius hundred planet ... but shouldt be a problem on 600+ radius i would imagine

Minimum 5? I haven't noticed the terrain being that difficult to warrant the use of hover units. In all honesty I can only see 2 units being replaced with hover units.
First one being the Vehicle scout unit simply because it changes the way games are played, it would allow you to start up with a vehicle factory instead of the usual Kbot factory +Dox opening (As long as you give the scout unit a very basic attack)
The other unit would replace the AA Vehicle unit so you can chase the bomber blobs across seas instead of having them pick at your units one by one.

The rest of the units already provided by the Devs seem to work just fine in all terrain types and are generally efficient at their roles. I don't see how hovercrafts will help there though, I mean if you look at it there would be no reason to build the bots or other vehicles if we have 5+ hover units which can basically do what the bots and vehicles do without being impeded by terrain. We may as well just make all the naval units like the Salem Class from SupCom and have them walk on land too. Replace one or two units with hover bases, 5+ is overkill and takes away from the game.

if you play on land heavy maps then it's no wonder ... but what about water or lava heavy maps with big islands/unconected continents for instance? ...
as of right now i dont see many people play on such maps ... and that is for varius reasons ... not having multiunittranports and hovercrafts is one of them ..

Lava's terrain and lava are why I tend to avoid them.

And water?

We have 2 amphibious units, and while they are cool, it's a little lacking in tactical diversity for island hopping.

Buff boats to support our infantry along with air support and island war fair will be off the frigging hook.

Boats and artillery duking it out, air battles, and infantry running up from below to storm the castles.

Asteroid belts would make space fleets almost a necessity. Uber has probably realized this in testing, and that's why we haven't seen them.

Only if you can hide on them as easily as normal planets.

I don't think hiding has anything to do with it. It's just too tedious to do orbital battles by jumping from asteroid to asteroid if there's hundreds of them. You need a space fleet to mow through them.

It's doubtful that a steroid field in game would be like that.

It's much more likely that a steroid field would be more of a un-landable object that spawns small moons, 3 or 4, or is one huge single orbital layer for our normal orbital units.

Oh ok. Then it could work I guess.

you still wouldn't be able to build them on lavaplanets though and amphibius bots cant travers them ... so while its an extreme edge case i think lavaplanets and planets with 70 to 100% water should be the reason to have a hovercraft factory ... the rest is ballance

Or at least a hover unit of some kind for one of the land factorys.

.... yea but you still wont be able to use it on a 100% waterplanet

At least with water, once boats work, we won't need too!

But we might need to give the naval scout unit some kinda gun.

*whispers* more units AND (still whispering) variety! ... yea i stop now

Doesn't matter if it's land heavy or water heavy, we got Kbots and Vehicles for land heavy planets and then air units for any plateaus with sneaky air fabber constructions. The full water planets, well we go ships and air units. You can build air factories on water too you know. It kinda phases out the hover units, although if you tweak existing units they can make an appearance.

For the lava planets your air units do just fine covering the lava pools, since anything else really doesn't go over the lava, because you know ~lava~ if you are really worried putting some artillery around it with AA defense works too.

More units? Why? Because more units? Devs gotta consider balance and if it's worth it to add hover units. They ended up removing subs which I was really fond of, loved the T2 sub xD but sadly it's gone now. That is Dev time that could be used to iron out bigger issues and add more features. More features = more variety too, just look at gas giant gameplay =P

I'm also pretty sure that if you set the T2 air transport unit on patrol between 2 points it'll ferry units between them. The only tweak I would recommend here is make the T2 transport a very heavy multi unit transport (6+ units being transported at a single time) A dedicated one way ferry point would be better though.

way too binary and not enough choice to make intresting and dynamic matches ... ships are actualy supposed to be slow while packing a punch and tough ... without much land it is actualy quite easy to defend against air as antiairtowers narwals and stingrays wreck air .. and naval vs naval combat is generaly slow .. but the point of naval is control of seas and indirect fire support to land, hovercraft would be direct firesupport to also give air a better chance .. on lava you would be very dependent on air if there isnt much land ... and on randomgenerated planets you should have any technology available you need ... imho hovercrafts are the middleground to everything on surface and as such should be independent and shouldn´t be forced into vehicles ..

Yeah gotta consider the overlap in roles, hence why a few tweaks (AA hover unit and scout unit) help. While the naval combat is slow, especially so on ocean worlds you've still got the orbital layers, planting a few anchors would help with the fire support.

You can also just build nukes in the water and try to get some quick hits in.

Also on the binary if you watch some of the replays, especially between 2 skilled players you'll find it isn't too predictable and can often times be quite dynamic and unexpected. The Kbot factory + Dox horde opening is commonplace in this build but the mid and late games are where it all comes out and spices up.