Air Force, features and functions.

At Admins request.

Admin wrote:right now i'm only releasing some minor updates but i know i'll be busy with school for the next month. So no clue when i'll work on the system.

But you're welcome to start a discussion, wouldn't mind to see what people would want to have it do. Sometimes, once in a while, amongst all the trash, a useful idea will show up

So, what is the publics ideas concerning the "Air Force". How would you like to see it used? What results are you hoping to achieve with it? What would just be realllllly cool to do with it?


I personally just dont want to see MS made over, and hope they have a unique and useful use. One that does not allow "One hit wonders", but can be a stratigic point of the game.

Thinks I DO NOT want to see
Airforce doubling attack/defense forces power.
A person with an airforce wiping out someone without an airforce
War getting cheaper with an Air Force


Things I think are good paths to pursue
Using the airforce to cripple income, or other non attackable stats
Wars being more expensive with an Air Force, but more damage being allowed.


possible reasoning
When you go "strafing" enemy lands, your just bombing and causeing destuction with no real target in mind. This slows income production due to everyone having to go to bomb shelters and such. Can be tied to UP if you wanted to. It could go either way as well , No time for "play" means slowed UP, OR all that time in the bomb shelter means a UP increase

The Airforce may be the way to attacking training facilities and weapons factories too.

Now everyone elses ideas.

Right now the current ideas:
1) airforce requires "fuel" cost. So if you dont use them, you dont pay fuel. you can chose if you want to send them on the next mission
2) it will NOT double power, maybe some minor increase 5-15%
3) in battles it will rather increase amount of units killed

4) airforce mission
Supression of income production
With each successful bombing raid you drop the target's income by some amount
Consecutive attacks drop it further until some minimum level (maybe 20%)
Income will be recovering automatically each turn until it's at 100% again. This recovery rate will slowly increase with each turn (to make it harder for a group of people to keep someone at the limit, and basically forcing them to allow target to reach 100% income again once in a while)

will the weapons used by the air force be one time use or repairable?

When you talk about increasing units killed, may I ask how that works? My question is based on
Example is me and you

I attack you without airforce(To keep the cost low) then once weapons are depleted I use my Airforce to increase your losses.

Will there be a way for ground forces to combat an airforce if they dont have one?

I like the set up on the income production TBH, just want to see cost and such. A group can keep one persons down but the cooperation would have to be well done.

I would also assume they would be the way to destroy training facilities and weapons plants?

on a side note, to combat air force bombers/fighters, you could combat them with a variety of things, such as:

1.) SAM (surface to air) infantry - Unless aircraft are involved in an assault, sit off on the side and can be killed by assassins and such

2.) Anti-Air structures - Could be an addition to level one or two construction yards, doing massive damage to air units, but can be sabotaged by spies and attacked by attack forces (similar to hunt assassins mission)

3.) Fighters - Fighters could be used on offensive or defensive, costing x amount to keep in the air and ready, but helps in case of a bombing run against you. Offensively, they could be used to escort bombers and protect from other fighters airborne at the time.

Any of these could be the basis for some way for non-air force and air force players to level the playing field and protect them selves.

I know theres flaws, so post what you guys think that could be improved/better units for this

the part which is already coded, is that airforce consists of fighters
but we could call them drones , one time use or something. so no biggie

Well .... a few things to consider :

1. Any kind of air power MUST require a maintenance fee. The plains/fighters/drones/whatever can not just simply stay in a hangar for 1 month then be ready to fight. Pilots do require training, they do need air time to learn to fly and fight and that equals fuel and maintenance workers.

What I suggest here is to have hangars. Each hangar can support a fixed no of planes and each will drain a fixed ammount of income. Like the other structures, each hangar becomes more and more expensive.

I also suggest to introduce a ratio between army size and hangars .... if you go beyond this ratio there is a chance that all strikes with the exception of raid and normal attack have a chance to destroy some hangars. If you stay below this ratio your hangars are safe as long as your income can support them ... so like mercs if your income drops into negative no more hangars ... however this has to be gradual, after all if you don't take care of 10 building they are not going to crush at exactly the same time.

There has to be some kind of a fail system not to have "inactive friends" who are "helped" to build a massive air force and attack an entire alliance and the army size / hangars ratio should do it.



2. Like it has been said air power should not increase the strike power significantly.

I think the cap should be at 20-25% and not more.



3. The air force should have a few distinct missions :

A. Air support. The basic function it will increase total strike power, it will increase the death rate for enemy units and it should also help a bit with the amount of kuwal stolen (raise the minimum % stolen by 2-3). If the enemy has also a decent air force losses are to be expected, however just a small % of planes should be destroyed.

B. Dog fight. This mission will engage the enemy air force and by doing that it will cause massive damage on both air forces. The defender will be helped by any anti air structures/weapons he has. This is strictly an air battle and ground forces don't count.

C. Bombing. This mission can only be used if you have air superiority (your air force is many times more powerful then the enemy air force). If attempted without air superiority the losses should be massive (over 50% I suggest). The effect on the enemy will be a temporary decrease in income and UP (bomb shelters aren't quite an environment to make more babies and many of them will be killed either by bombing or by the lack of medical facilities).

D. Facilities destruction. This mission will target training and weapons facilities (would be nice if coded first). I suggest a new technology or construction to be needed first before you can engage in this kind of mission ... let's call it laser guided missiles or something. After you research/build this you will do much more damage to facilities. Until you do you can either have the mission active but with limited damage (like raid before re-education) or bombing will also have a small chance of destroying facilities.



4. There should be some kind of anti aircraft sol based defenses .... let's call them SAMs.

First of all a building should be constructed before you can build SAMs. Second, I suggest weapon level to play a small part in the efficiency of SAMs ... a 5-10-15% part not something big, but it makes sense. For example for every lvl between attacker and defender SAMs get 3-5% more accurate or less accurate. Third, there has to be a limit on how many you can build and in order to have a good protection you have to invest both in SAMs and in fighters ... a bit like the soldiers/mercs ratio .... I mean you can have tons of SAMs but if the control center(s) are hit they are useless after. Forth, they also need to be maintained, so a fee should be deduced from your income.




I think we need more ideas and then admin should decide what will be coded and what not. After that we can start talking about AT cost, ST cost, ratios, etc ..... until then it's useless because you can not balance an unknown system.

That all seems pretty good to me. (I havn't had time to let it all sink in so I might have missed some problems)

Also:

rflash wrote:Pilots do require training.....

This made me think, perhaps you should need 1 UU per plane as a pilot. (Or more per plane for navigator or whatever)
These can be made into a seperate unit "Pilot". (Automatically trained when planes are built.)

-Alex

Well if we go in that direction .....

When admin will be in a very very very good mood ..... he could code experience levels for pilots .... if he goes into fight he will gain experience and that experience will help his plane be a bit better.

It's quite complicated to code as you would have many planes so many pilots, each with different experience levels ..... as I said a very very very good mood

Yeah or you could have a "pilot training level" like a spy level but for pilots/planes...

-Alex

rflash wrote:It's quite complicated to code as you would have many planes so many pilots, each with different experience levels ..... as I said a very very very good mood

I already gave thought to experience based systems.
The best thing I came up so far with is that there's just a general experience level taken for everyone.
So you have 100 pilots, they gain all 20 experience, but 10 of them die in the fight. So you have a total of 160 experience (or 20 experience per pilot).
train another 20 pilots and you'll still have a total of 160 experience but only 16 experience per pilot.

About air battles, the idea was that first the two fleets battle each other, then if the attackers forces are still standing, they then engage the defenders anti air defenses (buildings you can build like training facility). Then you deal some damage to the defending forces.

So are they manned aircraft or drones? you hinted towards the drone sinerio?

Admin wrote:About air battles, the idea was that first the two fleets battle each other, then if the attackers forces are still standing, they then engage the defenders anti air defenses (buildings you can build like training facility). Then you deal some damage to the defending forces.

I don't see the need to separate the battle in 3 parts.

If the attacking air forces beat defending air forces + anti air defenses then they add damage .... it makes sense that the defensive planes will work together with the fixed/static air defenses.

Now the question is .... do we build specialized planes or we have a multi purpose fighter .... so either you build a fighter, a bomber, an aircraft fighter, etc or you can just build 1 type of plane who can be equipped according to the mission : air-to-air missiles, air-to-sol missiles, intelligent bombs, etc. I do believe option 2 makes more sense for the game.

fighters were meant to come in 3 types:
Anti air, strategic bomber and tactical bomber

As such all fighters have 2 stats, fighter damage and ground damage.
When fighters fight against each other only fighter damage is taken into account in calculating remaining bombing power and fighter losses.

Anti Air I understand, but whats the difference between the 2 bombers?

and I dont understand

When fighters fight against each other only fighter damage is taken into account in calculating remaining bombing power and fighter losses.

. So the fighters can bomb as well? or the bombers follow behind the fighters?

I would think fighters would target bombers first, not fighters, but I may be wrong.

Consider this: Because of the "extreme" air force costs to new accounts, all players should have some base level of defense against it, that isn't equal to zero. Plus, once they get an air force, if anti-air fighters are included, they should lose that "base level of anti-air" because they "upgraded" to Air Force defenses. Also, consider that when attackers get damaged over enemy land, recovering their crashed planes is a slim to none chance situation. While they may get their PoWs back, they will not get their fighters back, but the defender most likely will be able to repair their defenses to the extent of taking non-damaged spare parts from one fighter and putting it into the slightly better working fighter that is getting repaired.

Thus: Attackers lose a portion of their air force when damaged.

Defenders lose some, but are able to recover most of their air force. Though the "fuel" would likely be depleted making further defenses tougher.

Think of this:

As the defender, are you going to keep spare fuel and replace the multi-million kuwal planes? Or are you going to salvage what you can of the planes and replace the fuel?

tactical bombers are ones which carry bombing load but still are capable of dogfights, so are the middle way between anti air and strategic bomber.
Strategic bombers focus on destroying ground targets.

Anti air defenses, the building, are intended to be buildable from con yard level 1 onwards, giving the player defensive capability but no offensive one.

OK I get it now
1 fighter
1 fighter/bomber
1 bomber

Where have I seen this set up before Uro? Was it the last incarnation of TAW before it became SGAW?

If I remember correctly, we had 1 major problem with this set up. If you make them like training and weapons, and it takes time to train them. Then you will see "one hit wonders" or lop sided Air Forces. Then you will see massive dog fighter airforces that can keep most other airforces down just from size alone. Then they will pair up with a full bomber squad who keeps the facilities destroyed.

Now I know, you are good at balancing things, just trying to cover some of the issues we experianced with this before.

well dunno, dont think I ever saw this setup before but obviously I know what you mean and it's already been considered.

I have seen it, just not sure exactly where. I am almost sure it was the last incarnation of The Ancient Wars before, it got turned to SGAW. Wish I could be for sure.

I think the "turn cost" or "maintinance fee" idea for the airforce will go along way towards regulating it, but even that is exploitable. You can tie up all your income keeping your AF going leaving your enemy nothing to farm. So some good checks and balances need to be found

Admin wrote:
I already gave thought to experience based systems.
The best thing I came up so far with is that there's just a general experience level taken for everyone.
So you have 100 pilots, they gain all 20 experience, but 10 of them die in the fight. So you have a total of 160 experience (or 20 experience per pilot).
train another 20 pilots and you'll still have a total of 160 experience but only 16 experience per pilot..

hmm.. I don't quite get this bit. If there were 100 pilots and each gained 20exp wouldn't the total be 2000exp between them.. so.. if 10 died, 800exp left. Failing to see how the 160 came here, or are you saying that the experience gained by each pilot is different ?, in which case the bit in red ( quote ) doesn't make sense
Or i got the whole idea wrong

About missions maybe make it so that there's a time delay ( 2mins? ) between landing and getting airborne , (time to refuel and do any repair work/maintenance, reloading weapons.. etc etc)... so this means you won't be getting Air support each time you hit someone.

Just a suggestion but i can guess the reply...

Survivor wrote:

Admin wrote:
I already gave thought to experience based systems.
The best thing I came up so far with is that there's just a general experience level taken for everyone.
So you have 100 pilots, they gain all 20 experience, but 10 of them die in the fight. So you have a total of 160 experience (or 20 experience per pilot).
train another 20 pilots and you'll still have a total of 160 experience but only 16 experience per pilot..

hmm.. I don't quite get this bit. If there were 100 pilots and each gained 20exp wouldn't the total be 2000exp between them.. so.. if 10 died, 800exp left. Failing to see how the 160 came here, or are you saying that the experience gained by each pilot is different ?, in which case the bit in red ( quote ) doesn't make sense
Or i got the whole idea wrong

About missions maybe make it so that there's a time delay ( 2mins? ) between landing and getting airborne , (time to refuel and do any repair work/maintenance, reloading weapons.. etc etc)... so this means you won't be getting Air support each time you hit someone.

Just a suggestion but i can guess the reply...

It should have read

Admin wrote:
I already gave thought to experience based systems.
The best thing I came up so far with is that there's just a general experience level taken for everyone.
So you have 100 pilots, they gain all 20 experience, but 10 of them die in the fight. So you have a total of 1,800 experience (or 20 experience per pilot).
train another 20 pilots and you'll still have a total of 1,800 experience but only 16.36 experience per pilot..

And I like the idea of a time delay, or even a "Launch AF for 1 turn, then must spend 1 turn grounded". I think it does add some stratagy as to when to use it, and when not too.

ok, something starting to be very strange, I remember replying into this thread correcting the numbers

nvm, nomad got the point across.

I got your back Admin

lol, with these discussions, I hope I won't be seeing an Ace Combat type Airforce system