Water Planets in PA and Hydross missions from TA...

Hello all, I just wanted to discuss a little bit about water planets and give my opinion on what would make them fun.

First off, I want to mention the missions from TA Core Contingency in the planet Hydross, and I want to say that those were some of the most boring missions ever. Pure water and seeing blue everywhere was horrible and tedious. Seeing coral and rocky shallow floors did not make it any better and I suppose their only purpose was to be used to block off ships and subs. Honestly though those missions were just no fun at all.

I think those missions were boring because there was literally no variety at all. It was just blue everywhere and spamming ships, subs, and torpedo bombers. The defenses were weak and useless, the buildings were limited, the units were really weak.

I just wanted to wish the best of luck to the Uber guys and ask them to try and add variety to battlefields in water planets such as insane storms, waves, maybe perhaps some type of sea life, better underwater construction facilities with more options and more overall effects since I know you can't really do much with water planets that you could usually do with regular earth-like biome planets.

Please give your opinions on Water planets and battlefields or your opinion on my thoughts.

"Nice" (meaning not just flat) ground below the water combined with underwaterbuildings and amphibious units that move on the ground of the sea could make things more interesting.
Also maybe a bit of land here and there.

Yea I was thinking perhaps also underwater thermo generators that absorb heat that is released through underwater volcanoes or pressure holes because of the mantle of the planet and such. I can't really agree with the patches of land because it wouldn't be a water planet if it had that unless the underwater volcanoes would explode and create islands and such.

I agree, water planets could use a shot in the arm. It would be nice to see amphibious units below, naval craft on the surface, and air in the sky. Besides that though I doubt they will make much in the way of atmospheric changes. The dev team already said they weren't implementing anything in the way wave motion effects.
It may be nice to have the option to build platforms. I remember back in TA there was a metal multiplayer map titled seven islands, which had large metal platforms in a vast sea. why not have the option of building something similar? Perhaps maybe sort of beacons that hold a platform around them in which you can build on. The beacon could be destructible, and once destroyed the platform and everything on top of it would drop into the murky depths. It would add a great risk reward factor. You could risk building these platforms and having the option of utilizing superior power generators, radar, defensive structures, etc etc etc that can only be built on land, while everything depends on the continued existence of the support beacon for holding the floor up above the waves.

My hope for water planets is that they will not be entirely water, but 90-95% water. We would still have epic size naval battles, but islands would give players something to base off of. Islands would become even more useful if there are not any "sea plane platforms" like there were in TA. You want air superiority? Control the islands.

We'll probably be able to set parameters for how many islands/none at all in the planetary generator anyway, so it should fulfill most of our desires.

In short: Planets completely covered in water should possibly even must not exist.

There needs to be some place to build factories to provide support with air or hovering ground units.

Well in TA there were Seaplane platforms, I'm sure perhaps Hovercraft platforms can be implemented the same way. And I agree with your first statement if we go by what TA did wrong, which was exactly that, but I think if done right, it can work and be fun.

Zero-K already allows you to build all non-landbound unit factories over water, and Supreme Commander toyed with omni-placeable structures with its air defence emplacements.

'Mostly-water' planets which would still have some peaking landmasses on them as is being suggested here doesn't quite carry the same tonation to me as an actual "water world".

I agree with the sentiment that the right kind of fix is adding more variety to the ocean topography and unit variety available on water planets, rather than just having islands. Because other planets with water on them will probably have islands, and that sort of eliminates the point.

A nice selection of underwater buildings/seafloor units/platforms of some kind sounds nice. Just as long as taking out the enemy's economy on a water world doesn't become a sonar witch hunt.

Yea, I know that feel. Having to send sonar planes all over the map in the hydross missions to find the subs and the underwater metal extractors.

What sort of features can you add to a water environment? You can always have things like rocky reefs and shallow land to block off movement. Shallows might only allow modest ships or deny subs, while the deeps have all options available.

A more domestic option is to have glaciers. Very cold worlds might have brutal ice floes that make travel slow or hazardous. The ice might be destructable, revealing water or opening up access to new waterways.

A more exotic option is to have underwater tunnels that only allow sub movement. Heavy ocean ice naturally lends itself to this feature, with subs underneath and land units on top. A world might connect its lakes through such a system, for example. I don't know how that could play out.

This wasn't helped by Total Annihilation's ancient user interface. Plus, RTS campaign mission design in 1997 was lethargic.

I think that's an excellent question right next to, "What kind of combat do you expect in a water environment?"

That's a large part of the issue: Naval warfare in Total Annihilation and (to a lesser degree) SupCom were very romantic. Giant bore naval cannons, broadside shots at other battleships, aircraft carriers launching dogfighting planes, submarines lurking under the sea...

When you remove topography from the equation and it becomes a question of 'deep water, shallow water' and perhaps the occasional unbuildable rock expanse or glacier (I like that idea, bobcules), then warfare on a water planet is mostly about information, and whoever brings a superior number of units to battle.

Will PA keep a 'romantic' take on naval warfare, or will we see more modern ideas implemented, like rail guns, missile defense, ECM, and the like? Even if they do, what will make combat on water worlds feel like more than 'whoever builds ships the fastest, wins'? I suppose I'm stuck thinking in Total Annihilation terms, where most of the ships you could build were quite expensive, so you were motivated to clump them together for survivability. Perhaps PA will feature more variety in chassis size, and roles for sea units.

Depending on you're definition of 'Railgun', SupCom had all of those......

Mike

Of course I should have been more specific. I was speaking in reference to the comparative ranges those modern contrivances imply, i.e. firing and coverage ranges speaking in terms of game kilometers instead of meters. SupCom did this much better than TA.

Also in terms of convergence of those technologies into a few hulls. Part of the romance of the classic WW2 fleet was the variety of types of boats, as opposed to the modern carrier battlegroups (which risk being narrowed even further into just a couple of very modular ships/carriers)

And by modern railguns, I mean those akin to the Blitzer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZPp3aEjuM), which can function as both direct and (exo atmospheric) indirect fire. That is to say, absolutely crazy range.

But more to the point, I'm wondering if we'll start seeing AA on every boat, anti-missile on every boat, some degree of ECM on every boat, or will we still be motivated to compose the battlegroups ala TA, with separate units that have separate functions.

We've been talking about this over in the backer lounge(unfortunately) and it's kinda split, some want the realism of a bit of everything on all ships, some want naval to be completely different from other layers.

Myself, I think however the units function(on an Engine level) we need to make sure it's fully fleshed out due to the inclusion of Water planets, as part of that, I think we need to be careful how many multirole ships we create, as we want just as much variety in a Naval combat as we do on Land.

Mike

The way I see water combat is in 3 types of environment

1 swamp / marsh environment
2 lakes / rivers environment
3 oceans environment

1 constant change from land to water makes hovers and amphibious units ideal

2 not big enough to invest in ships but small boats and amphibious/hovers to defend the lake would be ideal to defend the resources at the bottom

3 Oceans you can use all of the above plus add subs and large ships

BTW: Will we get same kind of GFX water as in Subcom, or will it be more animated maybe Tesselation (looks @ crysis) With ships moving with the waves?

Look wise for water combat I be happy if you can see the bottom of the ocean with an ocean blue tint to see the combat under water and buildings.
On plus side of this you see the landscape under the water (plus weeds and water life if any could be done before launch) to help remove the blue flat land of different shades of blue like in TA and most RTS.
On top of the water I would be careful with the water animation may interfere with visuals to see the base / subs under the water.

I would also like to mention more amphibious units such as seafloor dwelling tanks and kbots that shoot torpedos and fight off subs. In TA amphibious tanks were only available to Arm when I played the campaign missions (don't confuse these with hovercraft). And they could move underwater but they did not have any torpedo system so they were useless underwater when it came to defending themselves or any sort of attack underwater.