Will any unit be able to shoot at any other unit?

I remember back when I first played the original Starcraft, against the computer. I was learning all about the units while at the same time trying to blitz and command as much real estate as possible. I thought I was doing real well covering the map and hounding the computer... until a flying unit showed up at my base, dropping bombs. Quickly I race to see what I need to shoot it down, noticing that none of my units will even attempt to fire at it. And to build something to shoot it down, I first needed to build a certain building, to allow me to build another building, to allow me to build the units. For some strange reason, I couldn't do all that in time.

My base was flattened by one unit none of my units could attack.

That same week, I played Total Annihilation at a LAN party. I had a ground-pounding force headed to the enemies base to flatten it, when my opponent threw out some gunships for the first time. Oh CRAP I thought, my offensive forces are doomed. But then something interesting happened. My Bulldogs, the biggest thing ARM has on the ground, SHOT UP. And while they were terrible at it, I had so many of these ugly tanks that they saturated the sky and blew out the gunships.

My ground units wiped out lethal air attacks.

This was the moment I realized just how much I loved Total Annihilation. It wasn't stuck in the typical "rock paper scissors" unit design that most other RTS's had.

Please oh please tell me PA will have this. If not, please seriously consider it!

(Also, why couldn't I capitalize the words in my login ID? I saw at least one other name in the forum could....)

I really hope we'll have that too, I mean what the heck they have lazers wich can go far away but they can't even shot something above them?

I loved this feature as well.. if you remember your TA units you might remember the glory of a bunch of Mavericks pulling out their pistols and clearing the sky of gunships.

The aircraft were able to attack ground as well so you could use a swarm of fighters to slowly peck away at undefended buildings or units they found.

On the Supreme Commander side of things it was much more rigid in what can shoot what. But we did find out the hard way that nukes will detonate if they hit an enemy aircraft while attempting to launch. Had to go back to the replay on that one to figure out why I managed to nuke my own base.

I know that also manualy attacking in certain games used to work in order to trick air crafts to attack, altough the damage was fairly low.

Also its easy to take out subs with area effect guns in sup com by force firing on the ground. makes you play really wary with your subs to make sure you stay underneath the enemy.

this feature surely is "awesome" but at the same time it could be extremely odd for the gameplay. I think Air should only be shot by AntiAir. That will make the player have to build not only one unit type but some more, which is just more interesting.

It is still necessary to build anti air in TA. The major difference is that air is no longer an unbeatable hard counter for unescorted tanks, instead you still have to commit forces. similarly ground based anti air can be used against other ground targets but are not as effective as tanks. even in TA despite having this natural multi-rollness they never really achieved critical mass because you always took attrition.

I hope there is as much shooting at anything as possible. I think it is about softening RPS slightly instead of removing it. There still has to be RPS, Banshees beat Bulldogs. It is also nice if there are as few little armour types as possible.

Force firing on the sea to damage subs is silly. They should either automatically fire (which defeats the purpose of subs) or subs should take no damage from surface weapons (unless they are somehow tossed up onto the land).

The problem this causes is mainly one of making fast fighter planes too powerful. There are other issues too like making missile towers too good. It might be possible to fix it by making air units damage and health on a different scale to land units.

E.g. All aircraft have health in the range 20-200 and all anti-air has DPS in the range of 5-300. The weakest land units could have 300 health, therefore making it undesirable to use AA against land, but still usable at a pinch and not introducing arbitrary restrictions.

It's also entirely plausible that fast, lightweight aircraft can take much less punishment than tanks.

I was happy with how TA did it (and SupCom). Every unit could hit every other unit, but were generally only really good at air or ground, not both.

The missile turrets in TA (Defenders?) were quite good at AA, but also served as very low health land defense. It shouldn't be terribly difficult to balance these sorts of things.

Also, I don't see why anyone would want to bring something like Starcraft into this. I won't let anyone stop me from trying to shoot planes with my Big Berthas . Surprisingly rewarding when you succeed.

But Supcom did artificially limit what units could shoot what. This led to silly side-effects like fighter planes being unable to shoot tanks, but they could shoot planes landed on the ground. In the case that enemy planes were under shields, a big enough blob of fighters could take a shield down. But they couldn't target the shield directly.

I always thought that lasers would excel at antiaircraft and antimissile roles since they have basically pinpoint accurucy and infinite range. Although the laser beam might disperse on long distances and especially inside a medium such as air or water.
Although if the planets really have a curvature lasers usefulness would be limited as enemy units would have to pass the brink of the horizon before the laser get Line of Fire. Ballistic weapons could however lob projectiles from safe places behind ridges or maybe even below the horizon to where the lasers cannot reach.
Instant lasers beams could also be balanced to be expensive to build and require alot of energy to run while units like missiles and aircraft have armor that reflects laser but isn't of much use against flakk or other conventional antiaircraft weaponry.

I think another can of worms that could be open is that you ask what the difference between a missile and aircraft really is? Why shouldn't the same kind of weaponry be able to target both?
When they introduced the Mercy, a kamikaze aircraft in SupCom, they really messed things up at first since there wasn't any other accurate multiuse weapon where you pay for the damage you deliver without proper counter-mechanics.
I think you could have proper mechanics for "Missile Wars" but I haven't really seen them in an RTS.

I think that it should be left up to the individual units. That said, maybe there could be a toggle which tells a unit to attack ALL enemy units, even if it was not designed to. For example, artillery trying to hit aircraft. It won't work 99% of the time, but if all you have is artillery, it might save your butt.

Or an "ignore unarmed" toggle which negates the strategy of clouding the sky with cheap scouts to protect t3 bombers, at the cost of leaving yourself wide open to scouts. Also enables the tactic of sending in a force to smash the defenses of a base while leaving the valuable buildings unharmed (apart from stray shots) so you can capture them.

I'm a huge startcraft fan but I must admit that not being able to shoot at air units were pretty lame and frustrating, this also happens in many many RTS games out there.. after months of game play I learned how to handle this issue (it is not really an issue, just the way it works in StarCraft).

Thanks for the replies, and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks this direction would work better than classic RTS elements.

I look forward to the day when my big fat tank-analogues can fire in futility up in the air to shoot down the asteroid thats about to wipe everything out. I don't care if they succeed, only if they can try.

What I would say is that it's cool to watch, but hell to balance. I'd rather not include this feature in the initial release.

I got the impression that sup com was going to do this but got stopped for some reason. then in forged alliance they just went "well because we aren't doing it any more lets make these numbers what they should be"

puerly speculative though.

Vanilla sup com used this method of really low HP aircraft and high HP land units, with correspondingly low damage for Anti-Air and high damage for Anti-Ground. This led to issues in situations where anti-ground weapons targetted aircraft, for example, gunships attacking soul rippers, or land units attacking landed czars/soul rippers. It also meant you couldn't hit landed aircraft under shields, as the shields would be too powerful for the anti-air weapons (althought the reverse becomes an issue in FA, so it's a balancing act).

This should be handled automatically by the targeting AI. Having to set "modes" for individual units is micro that should be avoided.