Implementation of aircraft.

Since aircraft are almost definitely going to be in a near future release of Empires, I thought it may be a good idea to give some thought as to how they are going to be implemented, taking into account the limits on map size dictated by the source engine (thus restricting jet fighters since you'll end up hitting the other end of the map and DYING in around a second) and that map scaling is currently unworkable, again due issues with the source engine, as well as whats going work for the balance of the game.

I'll outline my own thoughts on the subject, feel free to flame and criticise as neccessary.

Aircaft will firstly need some mapping support - they will be completely unusable on a map like streetsoffire for example, due to the specific way its constructed, and a yes/no option in the emp_info_params to allow/disallow aircraft construction would be almost mandatory. A brush entity that redirects aircraft away from it would also be nice, to prevent impacts into the skybox. (it could have some message about "stop deserting the battlefield - autopilot engaged" to explain why your aircraft is inexplicably having its course redirected)

Aircraft stand a good chance of being overpowering, so they will need to be harder to obtain and easy (ish) to counter, and they should need to work with infantry and vehicles to be at their most effective.

I would suggest the airfactory being unlocked after a research in a new branch of tier two mechanical engineering, and advanced aircraft being unlocked in higher tiers after that, to limit aircraft to middle/late game and prevent early game rapeage, and ensure that tanks get well used alongside OMG AIRCRAFTS!!11!one!!1.

AA turrets would have to be rather effective even at their most basic level against aircraft to neccessitate ground forces to take them out, and they could be a nasty combination of explosive machine guns and ground to air missiles. (perhaps gaining the machine guns and additional missiles at higher levels)

Grenadiers would certainly need to beefed up even more against aircraft, perhaps homing missiles with manual control override to keep guided whores like mayama and dubee happy? Of course, a single gren shouldn't be able to waste a 2000 res aircraft.

Aircraft themselves would need to be rather expensive, and lightly armoured to prevent them from being skytanks, this vulnerability offset by maneuverability and dangerous armament.

As for what kind of aircraft are available, I think three varieties would probably work best. Those being the Dropship, the Light Gunship and Heavy Gunship.

The Dropship would the first initially available aircraft, and serve in an infantry carrying (possibly vehicle transportation?) capacity, with upgrades for spawns in higher tiers of the aircraft branch, if at all. Armed with dual single machine guns on a rotating turret underneath the cockpit, the dropship can provide adequate fire support for offloaded troops, but is quite a target for grenadiers and enemy vehicles.

The NF version would probably look like this:



And BE don't have a model or any concepts that I know of, so who knows what the BE version would look like.

The Light Gunship would be a fast, maneuverable aircraft that is a capable tank and infantry hunter, armed with missiles and machine guns. Effective in a hit and run capacity, the Light Gunship is however particularly vulnerable to anti-air thanks to its light armour, and ineffective against buildings due to its relatively light armament.

This vehicle would become available after research.

The NF version would probably look like this:



And BE don't have a model or any concepts that I know of, so who knows what the BE version would look like.

The Heavy Gunship would be the far slower, less maneuverable, heavily armed, slightly better armoured cousin of the Light Gunship, acting as an effective anti-everything weapon which is vulnerable, again, to anti-air, and the light gunship which can run (or fly) rings around it with ease. Armed with heavy missiles, machine guns and bombs for anti-base duties, the heavy gunship has a little more survivability than its smaller cousin, but it is still vastly weaker than its equivalent tank.

There isn't really a great candidate for the NF version of this on don megels site, so I don't really have any idea what this would look like.

And again, no concept or model exists for the BE iteration of this.

I've probably missed a lot of stuff out that needs to be addressed.

Anyway, Discuss. How would you like to see aircraft implemented within empires? (within reason)

 

Erm, there's a BE dropship in Hammer.. Great post otherwise.

 

We lack models, mostly for BE. AA turrets would be nice to have, too.

 

I hate to burst your bubble, but there will be no aircrafts in Empires EVER!

 

Yea christmas is canceled too on account of Santa being broke

As for the map scaling didn't ES have some trippy dynamic scaling when you left the ships, or something like that? I was under the impression that scaling was messy, but the least of aircraft's problems.

Anyway, they dont really need to be hard to obtain, just spawn both teams with stack of AA turrets or make AA vehicles/grens good against paper airplanes. Just enough to prevent an airplane rush. Aircraft maps are supposed to be big right? We wouldn't wan't people tanking too much and we absolutely wouldn't want people going anywhere on foot, except to nearby refs or to build things, etc.

 

No Blimps

 

I have some memory of brenodi aircraft flying through the skybox of emp_duststorm in some distant version of empires, do I remember this correctly?
... maybe it was a dream

 

Here be my thoughts on the prevention of pwnage from aircraft.
In BF1942, which I think had a good balance between tanks and aircraft, although the aircraft took far too long to get used to. It did this by making them, unlike tanks, vulnerable to everything. If you emptied an AR clip into a plane, it could take around 10% daamge. Not so impressive, but if you had 3 roflmen emptying HMGs into it, different story. Plain MGs could be used (or even cannons, if that's the way you roll) , although it would be difficult to get the pitch right. On top of this, introduce the AA turret. These are the most expensive, but pwn planes in their cone. MLs would also be able to shoot, but only if they were flying pretty low.
DIAGRAM:



Also, bombs. You said the dropship would be MG only, that's cool. But what I'm suggesting is a having a new weapon type, a one with no propulsion except an apple's best friend, gravity. And momentum. This means it's easiest when going slowly and low to aim it, where they are most vulnerable. These could be researched tied in with cannons (HE is epic splosion, very susceptable to momentum, rails have high damage and drop quickly, so easy to use, ER is the same but moar splash less damage, plasma is like a big overheat cannon, that does little damage to tanks but massive heat, and fries infantry in a large radius.) Types of homing missiles could also be used, though I'd suggest all missiles are homing, with relavent affects researched (UML is very powerful, bio is bio, 'tracking systems' is fast and better lock on).


One other thing is parachutes. Now I know, Empires devs don't like parachute mod, and that's kind of understandable. But which army sends their guys into planes without parachutes? So I'd suggest a 'weapon' in slot 6 that you get when you enter a plane. To use it, change to your chute and left click, right click to cut loose.

Perhaps an option for grens would be 2 RPGs, one which is like it is now, except, for obvious reasons, more powerful, and one with a homing function, but weaker, so only really good against those weaker aircraft.

 

Did try already...
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/forum.asp?forum_id=8
...in your search for a modeler?

 

ES basically has 3 maps. One for each of the battleships (extras for other places infantry can be) and the space region. The space region contained scaled down versions of the infantry maps to give the ships room to fly around in. Moving into and out of hangers would effectively swing you in and out of these different maps. I believe they used mounted cameras to give players views of what's going on on either side of the hanger walls. They have gotten the glitching as you re-scale down pretty much as far as it will go.

Empires can't do that since aircraft are always interacting with infantry/tanks, so you can't partition one region to be air only (unless some kind of cloud layer gets added and we divide it into two or more maps w/ infantry/vehicle warps between them..... ugh). Also, many have complained that trying to scale the models and such in Empires will cause too much of a hassle plus re-working some physics stuff and poor rounding errors and etc. Empires has a remarkable amount of physics going on, so screwing with rounding error can really mess things up. Again, blame Krenzo for building the Empires framework while learning to code. He just didn't have the experience to forsee this properly. We can't make the maps larger because they are already using up the source Engine resource limits.




Back to the topic on hand, a solid framework. One thing to consider is partitioning AA and ground weapons so that we don't end up with the Mutalisk balancing problem. For those unfamiliar, this was a huge thorn in StarCraft balance until recently because the Mutalisk weapon hits both air and ground so it was difficult to balance its role. They finally in the couple of years or so have gotten it to a reasonable place in balance. This is especially true for grens since missile would have to fire faster to catch up with aircraft, unless there's a lock-on system.

I suggest people take a look at how aircraft, vehicle, and tanks are balanced in UT3 gameplay. It's a fairly solid system, basically aircraft aren't uber death platforms like in BF2 because they have to hover and all players can grab weapons that can be effective such as a homing missile launcher and the rail gun. Hitscan weapons do wonders against aircraft due to their fraility, while the standard missile launcher is used against the slow tanks since it does more damage and they can't run away as quick.

I'd be in favor of all weapons doing damage to aircraft. Sure a smg will be near useless, but a couple of riflemen scoring hits should make a dent in the armor. Perhaps the heavy variety can have a higher resistance to bullets, but it much slower making cannon sniping viable.

We also need to consider tank firing arcs so that they are vulnerable if the planes get directly above them, but with enough distance they can still knock them out of the sky with carefully aimed shots.



Make sure the profiles of the aircraft are distinguishable from a distance. No "is that a APC or a AFV" confusion please.

 

what happened to that early trailer of empires
the one with pirates of the carribean music
i saw aircraft flying through emp_duststorm also

 

Empires stole another model a while back and used it as the BE dropship. Duststorm had some on tracktrains in the skybox.

 

Good point. One driver for transport and others either are along for the ride or perhaps have ports they can shoot out of.

For the light I would say keep the driver and gunner the same. However, maybe allow for a secondary gunner to control another set of weapons like an extra MG turret or something. So, perhaps while customizing you put all the weight onto armor, but if you have a 2nd pilot you still have some weaponry.

For the heavy pilot+gunner could definitely help balance.


Be careful, though. See BF2 and BF1942 helicopters for how difficult it can be to have a driver and gunner independent of each other.

Nah.....

 

If empires is to have aircraft I would make it so that there is only a transport aircraft, basically like a flying APC.

I don't think there needs to be a gunship aircraft, you could give the transport a small weapon but gunships are going to be overpowered on most maps. You could limit them to maybe two per side but then everyone s going to whore them and the two gunships would decide whole games because they're powerful. Either you make aircraft not be powerful or you don't include them at all.

A transport has utility purpose and shouldn't upset the balance much, you could add side guns onto the transport if you wanted to give it a limited gunship role but it should be easy to drive off and have very limited anti-tank ability.

You don't really need an airfactory either, just spawn them on the repair pad. The NF repair pad would need remodelling but I don't see why it should be neccesary to have a whole new building, a repair pad and vehicle factory should be fine.

To be honest I don't want aircraft in empires, every game I've ever played makes aircraft ridiculously overpowered except for possibly battlefield 1942, aircraft are like snipers, either they are overpowered, or they only exist to deal with other aircraft.

 

I like the way BF heros does airplanes. You can't stay still or else you crash and die, thus making it impossible to continuously fire at a single area. You have to make sweeps which is nicely balanced against aircraft. They are useful, but not overpowered.

Don't make aircrafts (with the exception of the transport) like shitty floating tanks. Thats just retarded and OP in very aspect

 

BF heroes is lame as fuck, and aircrafts that hover are not OP just look at BF2142. (BF2142 is funz)

 

TV guided missiles ftw

Seriously though, I can't really see aircraft becoming overpowered if they are made sufficiently vulnerable. They will still be useful and often vital complements to the rest of the game, but aside from the cool factor, they won't be preferential.

Also, another thing to consider: Will aircraft mount their own varieties of weapons, or use already existing vehicle weaponry?

 

i would make different types of transport, personally

also giving each vehicle 2 or more "chores" makes them usefull on more fronts (and thus be worth the money) without being OP

-Transport: basically flying apc and can only carry people but spawns them aswell some machine gun slots on the nose for personal defence would do nice

-Gunship: aimed at anti vehicle and can carry 1 vehicle into battle big machine guns on the nose, and possibly even cannons/missiles

-Fighter/Bomber: if really needed this could be added as orientated at bombing runs and shooting down other craft the fighter just has to have some great anti air missiles to be a good fighter, then a small bomb bay and it will do nicely as anti aircraft/building, only including "anti air" capabilities will make the fighter a very costly scout plane if the enemy decides to not use air planes at all


i see all of these air planes flying at about the same speed, that is a little faster as a light tank at top speed

 

In order to make them 'sufficiently vulnerable' you have to make them killable by any tank more easily than that tank can kill another tank.

Aircraft have massive mobility advantages which means they need to die before they can run away and certainly before they can do significant damage to a tank, otherwise they can just ambush vehicles with ease, regardless of how weak you make them.

So if you can think of a way to make aircraft incapable of killing tanks unopposed, to reduce the dominance of their ability to ignore terrain restrictions and travel faster than anything else, and to make them killable by any player in any vehicle, you're going to make them overpowered.

However I wouldn't want to fly an aircraft with those limitations, it'd be boring.

Er, have you actually played BF2142? Have you SEEN how many kills a gunship can get even with all the millions of anti air emplacements? Why do you think everyone whores the gunships?