*sarcastic* yea go C&C Generals style airport, a short runway, control tower, a hanger perpendicular to the runway, and a heli-pad. NO!!!!!!! vertical take-off and landings take up less space unless you have a civilian air port placed by a mapper NF or BE can commandeer (like the refinery)
no, just make sure you build your vehicle factory has space in front off it. Same thing like with VFs. Fail VFs face the wall. Empires airplanes should be able to take off with minimum runway.
I for one love this idea. It automatically dictates which maps have airplanes and which don't, since a map which doesn't have an airfactory "node" can't have aircraft, and it could prevent the comm from putting an airfactory in a stupid place . I guess it would contribute to monotony and redundancy of building bases on classic maps, i.e. you always build a barracks here, you always make a base SE, but I think it would be a cool way to implement aircraft. Also I just wanna make a really cool looking airport
People can't even do that with a VF. Weapons can be disabled while in VTOL mode to prevent floating death tanks.
if I recall, I made a post involving docks working the same way. LINK We can have a civilian landing stripe that the commander can place a Aircraft Factory over, of coerce it will need coding to snap in the correct direction. Also make 3 airport models, civilian landing stripe (w/ node coding), NF and BE Aircraft Factory.
Instead of fucking around with airports and other poorly contrived shit, why not just stick a value in the emp_info_params that says "Aircraft? Yes/No"? Aircraft are built from a factory, it wouldn't make sense for the airfactory to have special conditions for its placement when the vehicle factory doesn't. Oh, and aircraft will have to be VTOL's. There isn't enough room for battlefield style jets in even the biggest maps (think cyclopean and duststorm) and no, we can't have bigger maps due to limits on the source engine.
This would be the only way to do it if you want runways, if not, than a heli-pad is all you need. I voted for the commandeering a civilian landing strip (Airport Node). Please place your vote HERE
1. None of those designs seem to be suited to air-to-air combat that will exist because of these vehicles. 2. No fighters or bombers, WTF. 3. There should be at least 2 pilots/co-pilots per dropship/gunship.
I can't wait until someone makes a map thats aircraft carrier blimbs fighting and theres ref points on clouds. Thats my big concern with aircraft implementation
Aircraft should NOT be hard to pilot, or require 4 people just to get off the ground. Simply because Empires isn't a realistic game, and should work with a few people on a server too. Aircraft need 2 roles as is: transporting troops, and providing a lot of firepower where tanks can't go. A transport VTOL and a gunship VTOL are sufficient variations. Later, heavy/light/medium versions of these can be made, to house different weapons.
Agree 100% if 4 people were required per aircraft then engineers would have field day whenever 1 got shotdown because they would get 5 points so just taking 4 aircraft down=20 points. And forget realisim i wouldn't get aircraft if they were expensive, hard to use, expensive to research, took 4 tickets out whenever they died, and were easy to destroy. Balancing shouldn't be an issue they should be expensive to get and make and should be powered as such if it means that they are very strong thats great but if you lose them or crash them alot your res will go down very quickly. I would say a gunship should be 1900-2600 res and should be a little challenging to destroy.
Forget realism at all. This is about semi-arcade gameplay, with semi-realistic visuals. Realistic must go away when half the server is carrying magical iPods that resurrect the dead, create buildings out of nothing, and make enemies disappear.
What happen to the whole scaling maps thing? Airplanes weren't suppose to be able to be used in current maps because of the size. A single gunship in the middle of cyclopean could take out everything around it. But scale everything down 16x and you got a map thats 256x the size of cyclopean. Even 3 phase jeeps would take forever to get from one side to the other.
Scale everything down, and forget about melee, headshots, and all that other "physics" and "collision" jazz for small stuff. Read Source documentation plz k tnx?
In reality, map scaling is not feasible. nuff said. A single gunship in the middle of cyclopean would not be able to kill everything on the map due to accuracy, lock on ranges, map fog, nodraw distance... Also, you can be shot by everything around you whilst you only shoot in one direction. Neutral airfields, whilst they may be a nice touch, should not be staple. do as omni said, the mapper decides if an AF can be placed, default is no. Buildings can be spawned by flag caps, so even if AF building is disabled it would be possible to have neutral airfields only, if the mapper wanted. Co-piloting tanks without ridiculous visual perks (turrets being left behind, people shooting 10 yards away from their gun...) is impossible, full stop. I imagine aircraft would be similar. Also, it would suck to need multiple people to use a plane, remember most people are noobs or newbs... Aircraft won't be fast because a) small maps and b) they'd be invincible. The thing about them is they go over things. That's their advantage, their disadvantage is the fact they esplode pretty quick.
