Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Suggestions => Topic started by: Garfunkel on November 21, 2022, 11:43:15 PM
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With the new features to ground forces organization and construction coming in 2.2, I've thought about additional combat mechanics to make ground battles little less deterministic. Currently it's all about tech and tonnage, with only breakthroughs and fortifications providing surprises. It's also very difficult, if not impossible, to model some aspects of actual wars. However, we probably don't want to make ground combat too complicated and I to something that takes more effort than space battles.
Recent events made me think about the importance of the three things from the topic and how they can, and have, surprised military planners in the past if said planners have been unduly fixated on hardware and numbers. Military history is full of examples where the underdog has defeated a technologically or numerically superior forces. So here's what I've been thinking:
1. Each unit / element should have a morale and training value. These could be hidden and only shown at formation level as an average. The exact numbers are not that important but a scale from 0 to 100 probably works well enough. After construction, unit / element starts with 100 morale and 0 training. Additional training points will be gained over time as the unit is 'idle' - though if it isn't too difficult, then assigning formations to train where they consume supplies would be a great addition. Training value then impacts how 'accurate' the unit / element is in battle. Purpose is that poorly trained units perform badly in combat whereas highly trained ones perform well. Actual damage would still be decided by weapon tech and modules.
Morale could also be tied to race militancy rating and higher training value could increase it up to 100. This would be a nice way to differentiate races more.
2. In any case, combat losses should decrease morale but high training slows this. As morale gets low enough, there is a chance that the formation 'breaks' perhaps tied to percentage of total number of units lost so that small formations aren't unduly punished. Once a formation 'breaks' it cannot achieve breakthroughs or even fire and it loses terrain and fortification bonuses, making it an easy target for destruction.
So a poorly trained formation would struggle to 'hit' enemy formations while at the same time it would be at risk of 'breaking' if it suffers significant damage. Building lot of formations would still help as the incoming damage would be spread around but this would give smaller but highly trained formations a chance.
3. Organization would be a value tied to all headquarters and act as sort of an organisation wide bonus/malus to every formation in it. There's probably a better name for it, maybe 'control' since 'command' is already used by HQ modules. What it represents is the overall C4ISR ability of a large military force. This would require a new technology line but it could introduce sort of ECM/ECCM feature to ground combat. Alternatively, or additionally, HQs could have two manually adjustable values, one for 'command' size and another for 'C4ISR' capability but tech could improve the bang for your buck that you get. That way your garrison forces could still have cheap headquarters since they don't need more but your NPR home world invasion army deserves the expensive toys.
This value would then be 'consumed' in battle as the organization loses HQ units. High value would increase the chance for breakthroughs while a low value would decrease it. Low enough and your formations would be unable to perform them at all. High enough and your agile, well led troops achieve them all the time, making it a force multiplier like it is in real life.
This value could also be modified by additional ground and space assets. A ECM module for light vehicles would degrade enemy C4ISR rating, same as a ship in orbit with the same module. Ground support fighters could have a new ECCM mission where they go specifically after enemy ECM units. STO formations could prioritise ships in orbit that carry ECM modules. This would probably need to be separate from the current, space battle ECM module.
These additions would both mirror real world experiences and bring in a new layer to ground combat that shouldn't be too complex as it would mostly require preplanning which is the bread and butter of Aurora already.
Thoughts?
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seems to me the sheer scale of a planetary invasion is likely to turn any of this into just kind of background noise anyhow. from a user-facing perspective it's all deterministic either way. you hit "go" and the war proceeds largely without further interaction.
a super crude combat resolver that simply had "live" and "dead" states for each unit but had even a few interesting operational decisions would represent an advance as far as i am concerned.
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seems to me the sheer scale of a planetary invasion is likely to turn any of this into just kind of background noise anyhow. from a user-facing perspective it's all deterministic either way. you hit "go" and the war proceeds largely without further interaction.
I broadly agree here. I don't really see where this training/morale mechanics adds anything in the realm of "interesting decisions" to the ground combat system. The HQ extension I think has more promise since it is an actual decision that can be tied to a direct battlefield impact and pro/con balance.
As usual with Aurora, I think a lot of the thought about ground combat tends to lose track of the part where the design scenario for these mechanics is multi-million ton armies going at each other for planetary domination. On a micro scale, the idea of a smaller corps of highly-trained formations going up against a larger army of poorly-trained is an interesting RP scenario, but on the full scale of things what will happen in practice is that most units will have full training, if they were built some time ago, and the most recent units would still be working up. The militancy connection is I admit more flavorful, but mechanically it is creating a strict optimum which is not mechanically interesting. Additionally, at least personally I don't like the implicaton of added micro that a training mechanic implies, already we have enough complaints about the naval admin version of this mechanic and that is just shuffling ships around every six months.
The ideas about organization, C4ISR, and EW are I think extremely flavorful and would reflect modern advances in ground combat that the current system doesn't capture. I would like to see C4ISR/EW capabilities filter down from higher HQs, which would give HQs some more interesting elements besides artillery and construction and promote more complex hierarchies.
As far as making GC less deterministic, I don't think adding more random or hidden mechanics is the way to go. Personally I would sooner see some increased emphasis on logistics, frontage system with local targeting, or partisan networks to address this - but I don't want to veer too far off-topic here so I'll leave those there.
a super crude combat resolver that simply had "live" and "dead" states for each unit but had even a few interesting operational decisions would represent an advance as far as i am concerned.
I'd certainly like more operational decisions (that don't involve adding micro), but removing the granularity of the current system also removes a lot of the RP interest in designing formations and units which I think is critical to preserve. Maybe something halfway between VB6 and the current mechanics would be good, where formations are still designed at the unit level, but once constructed are treated only as a formation and the player never has to interact with individual elements or units unless they want to manually reconfigure - reinforcement, resupply, rebuilding, etc. handled by aggregate mechanics. I thought unit series would be the step in this direction but so far it has been slow progress in an unclear direction for me.
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just to clarify: i wasn't advocating for a cruder combat resolver as an improvement in and of itself, i was illustrating a price i would happily pay for more interaction.
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There's reason to overhaul the current ground force system in general, it works right now but is kept barebones to permit players to handwave "why" and "how" of many aspects of ground force performance. Plenty of discussion previously about how it could be overhauled. I would think it'd be best to include types of conscription; professional army or mandatory military service, and how long the service time is. The latter could dictate the maximum amount of training formations could have, and how costly it's going to be, which would go a long way to deter players from keeping around a gigantic military.
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which would go a long way to deter players from keeping around a gigantic military.
Of course you NEED a gigantic military if you are going to invade a homeworld. If your ground forces are a frivolus decoration for minor battles on outposts and paraded you don't need a large military I admit but then you could argue in that case you don't need an army.
I thought about what would be needed to put in various levels of conscription and long service units but it gets complicated if you are going for the effective Prussian or Isreali models of conscription you also need a mechanism to allow creating extra equipment for the reserve units activated in emergencies and then for the problems that creates you need to model the effect on the civilian economy of calling up the reservists all of which starts to get very complicated and hard to determine the precise effects which would model it. It would want a linjage between military and commercial manpower which currently does not exist and that is a another level of complication and management stress never mind the developer stresss. And if you really want it you could SM in reserve formations and SM out civilian manpower when you do
If you want to model the current Russian conscription and corruption model you can jst randomly delete most of your military any time there is a battle. I don't think many players would want a corruption system modelled which crippled their ability to do things, we like being competent dictators
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Yeah I don't really think we need mechanics to dissuade construction of large ground forces, it is already actually quite difficult to manage this in practice particularly since we have no mechanism for upgrading formations - once you start needing to upgrade existing units to remain relevant, expansion becomes even harder. And we already need 10+ million tons to reliably carry out homeworld invasions, which frankly I think is still less than "realistic" measured against IRL militaries which would be even larger.
If anything we need to delete all the ranks below Colonel from the rank tables in the DB so players are not misled into thinking that 1,000-ton companies should be the basic formation size, but that wold be a tedious job so I understand why Steve is unlikely to do this.
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While I love this game I'm generally not thrilled over the new combat mechanics as it on some levels are too detailed for the overall impact it has. The decisions should basically be about strategic movement and deplaoyment of troops.
My main issues is that combat which generally should be measured in months and years in general is concluded in days or weeks... this make troop deployment nearly pointless in most respect outside role-play... unfortunately.
We need a more simple ground simulation so it is not so computationally heavy or that it create such a massive log for larger conflicts that can slow the game down in a way I think it should not.
I do like the construction and detal of units in theory but less in practice becasue it have rather little impact in the end due to the randomness of unit engagements. It also can become very player intensive to interact with the mechanic for rather little overall impact in real terms as a result.
We need ground conflicts to last longer for it to have a much more important strategic impact, those are the decisions we should be concerned with. Where and how large forces to deploy where and how to conduct counter offensives in a strategic or operationally sense.
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My main issues is that combat which generally should be measured in months and years in general is concluded in days or weeks... this make troop deployment nearly pointless in most respect outside role-play... unfortunately.
I personally feel like returning to the 5-day ground combat increment would be an improvement, although you do run into some issues with balancing against ship-based fire this way. More robust would be to link it to the construction cycle with 20% base fire accuracy at 5-day increments and proportional scaling with the actual increment.
Do this, and combine that with a rework that makes Unit Series the basis of the formation rather than unit classes, which allows trivially easy upgrading and reinforcement without a lot of micro, and I think you have a very robust system which is detailed for initial setup and flavor, and low-maintenance after that.
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Those would be great improvements, as well as being able to return formations to the GFCC queue for upgrade/replacements. The formation has a template, it just needs to compare what's currently in the formation vs the template, calculate the missing BP and once those are spent, the formation is back up to speed.
One of my biggest slowdowns post invasion is that I have to manually do those checks - what is every formation missing, which I need to total so I can create a temporary reinforcements formation that half the time I then need to manually parcel out to the individual units because the reinforcements check doesn't work correctly.
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I would prefer the formations to be more like ships. You have a formation (ship) with elements (components). GFCC would work more as shipyards, but with free retooling to different formations. ïf you want to replenish or refit the formation, just move it to planet with GFCC and choose task to replenish or refit.
We would most likely need some equivalent of MSPs to replenish ground formations in situations where there is no GFCC present. It could also work as prebuild ship components to make training of new formations quicker. We could for example take inspiration from WITPAE - manpower and armament is used to make ground formations.
Replenishment in the field could have cost in morale or training level of the formation and replenishment in GFCC would not have effect on these stats.
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which would go a long way to deter players from keeping around a gigantic military.
Of course you NEED a gigantic military if you are going to invade a homeworld.
I was thinking along the line of carrying out a mobilization and demobilizing as needed like you said. This would of course mean reworking the economy back to older model to permit player building a stockpile of currency.
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Not just currency.
One of the major problems of mobilising reserve forces or wartime conscription and exapnsion of is balancing the need for military manpower against the people needed to build the weapons and run the economy in general.
This has was the main limiting factor for the UK and USA in WW2, The Russians gutted large parts of their economy to maintain larger forces and the Germans had massive problem as well. The French had to return some personel from active units in early 1940 becasue they were critical to wrar industries. In 1967 a major factor in the Isreali decision for a pre-emptive strike was that they needed a fully mobilised military to face their opponents standing armies and every time there was a crisis and they mobilised their economy crashed so they had to fight and win or risk letting their opponents attack when they were not mobilised.
Every major industrial war has faced conflict between the manpower to fight the war and the manpower to build the war machine. None of this is even slightly represented in Aurora and would be a massive amount of effort to implement and then a massive amount of hassle for players to manage and would not really add much to the playing experience.
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I think that conscription could be made into a relatively simple mechanic like basic training level for crew.
A level for each colony... it would cost some population and wealth that is not available for other work. In turn you would automatically spawn some troops if combat happens based on the population count. While troops are drafted then wealth cost should increase as a result.
The mobilization and demobilization could also be a player choice.
It would be simple and have an impact on player decision making.
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Gentlemen, I would argue that you seem to have forgotten what 2.2 is bringing us.
Firstly, the copy+update template:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg162229#msg162229 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg162229#msg162229)
Which will make creating new formations after gaining new tech super easy. Combine with the replacements series thing we already have, this will take care of most of the headache in keeping armies up to date.
And, even more importantly, the Ground Force Organizations:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg162324#msg162324 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg162324#msg162324)
Which will make handling armies lot easier and more convenient. These two will remove most of the current headaches we have and which you guys brought up as detrimental.
For example, I agree that having formations gain training points for free is silly, but thanks to the new Organizations, you can have your entire Army switched to 'Training' mode in 1 click, during which they will consume GSP, and once you're satisfied with results or run out of GSP, a second click brings them back to 'Default' mode. Thus, only formations you deem worth it will get training, others can do without it - for example, your defence and STO forces and police units probably don't need training unless you love constructing GSP endlessly.
Also, let's not give up on the ground combat system just because NPR HW invasions are such multi-million-ton affairs that leave little room for details. We still go through ship boarding combat, capturing outposts, fighting small formations of spoilers, and all the numerous possibilities between multiple player races.
Though finally, I have to admit that I want to make a ground-combat specific campaign for 2.2 where humans work as mercenaries for advanced aliens so I obviously have a vested interest in making GC as complex and feature-rich as possible.
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Also, let's not give up on the ground combat system just because NPR HW invasions are such multi-million-ton affairs that leave little room for details. We still go through ship boarding combat, capturing outposts, fighting small formations of spoilers, and all the numerous possibilities between multiple player races.
Let's also not discount multi-million-ton affairs either. May not be a lot of room for squad-level WH40K insert roleplay, but the strategic and logistical challenges to deploy such an invasion force is quite involved and is one of the biggest examples of long-term planning having a big payoff in Aurora, IMO. I think the system as it will be in 2.2 is close to what it needs to be to support both small and large-scale ground combat (although I may not personally like every implementation decision along the way), just a few more steps are needed for a fully streamlined experience.
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I think the main thing regarding combat not working well that I have mentioned an inordinate amount of times by now is CAS and the overall AA implementation. I'm not sure if AA is overpowered but thanks to micromanagement issues (which I think will persist mostly in the current state of 2.2) means that CAS cannot be fielded in enough numbers compared to AA units - which of course results in annihilation for anything in the air.
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I think the main thing regarding combat not working well that I have mentioned an inordinate amount of times by now is CAS and the overall AA implementation. I'm not sure if AA is overpowered but thanks to micromanagement issues (which I think will persist mostly in the current state of 2.2) means that CAS cannot be fielded in enough numbers compared to AA units - which of course results in annihilation for anything in the air.
Rest assured, AA is also tremendously overpowered. :)
I am still in favor of folding CAS into a new ground unit class for aircraft, which would solve most issues and still leave the option of traditional naval bombardment mechanics for those who have a soft spot for space-to-air superiority fighters for some absurd reason.
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--- Having dedicated Air Units in addition to GSFs would probably go a long way towards alleviating the current issues with AA. Allowing them to soak up AA fire by tasking them with AA Suppression missions. Allowing GSFs to benefit from a form of Fighter Pod ECM would also go a long way towards this, while perhaps even a Fighter Pod Shield Generator specifically tailored to the eight hour Ground Combat rounds could help alleviate it even further.
--- These things would prove tremendously helpful in reducing the dominance of AA as well as a reduction in micro of GSFs since less could be used and to greater effect. New Fighter Pod types would help quite a bit.
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The current ait combat system is way too micro and heavier AA is just too effective unless you armour the fighters allot...
I would appreciate a ground based air combat model... but we also need some module on ships so we can station air support from ships in space as well. We also could combine orbital bombardment to help targeting AA as well using air units as sort of FFD ground units are using them.
Currently I just ignore the air combat in the game as it is not a very fun mechanic to interract with at the moment.
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Currently I just ignore the air combat in the game as it is not a very fun mechanic to interract with at the moment.
I don't even build AA for roleplay in most games anymore, because mechanically it is just awful. Fun fact: due to how AA fire is actually calculated, AA units below a certain racial weapons tech level will be completely useless against enemy fighters as their AA damage is rounded down to zero, notably the LAA component is useless until you reach racial weapons strength 10 or higher.
I'd rather have AA be used against a ground-based aircraft class with the same mechanics as everything else, and STOs be used for defense against spacecraft (space-based aircraft from carriers, as Jorgen suggests, would be fine to counter with regular AA). The whole space-to-ground mechanic is just a mess right now.
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Currently I just ignore the air combat in the game as it is not a very fun mechanic to interract with at the moment.
I don't even build AA for roleplay in most games anymore, because mechanically it is just awful. Fun fact: due to how AA fire is actually calculated, AA units below a certain racial weapons tech level will be completely useless against enemy fighters as their AA damage is rounded down to zero, notably the LAA component is useless until you reach racial weapons strength 10 or higher.
I'd rather have AA be used against a ground-based aircraft class with the same mechanics as everything else, and STOs be used for defense against spacecraft (space-based aircraft from carriers, as Jorgen suggests, would be fine to counter with regular AA). The whole space-to-ground mechanic is just a mess right now.
I am on same page. Still think there should be a "groud unit" called planes which interacts only with other planes, attacks same as the artillery, and can be attacked only by AA (or other planes as said).
If you want to make it a bit more interesting you could have planes bombers and planes fighters as well as customization.
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You could make the current space fighter things much more powerful in terms of damage. So you need lots of heavy AA to protect your units from them.
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The ground-unit-but-not approach would have the benefit of allowing the AI to field them as well. I know they use fighters, but do not use GSF. How do Precursor 'Hunter-Seeker Drones' sound?
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Since people seem to be gunning for air as a ground unit type I'm left wondering what would be their specialty vs the other vehicle types besides interaction with AA? Attacks rear-echelon and support formations unless providing support for a frontline unit? What about targeting rules when there is enemy air involved? What about unit capabilities for these air units? I don't think "jungle fighters" works in this context, as funny as the pun may be.
The current air combat system is way too micro and heavier AA is just too effective unless you armour the fighters allot...
Armor doesn't help because AA benefits massively from shock damage mechanics. Perhaps you could try something with endgame shields but then the crushing numbers of AA becomes a problem.
I would appreciate a ground based air combat model... but we also need some module on ships so we can station air support from ships in space as well. We also could combine orbital bombardment to help targeting AA as well using air units as sort of FFD ground units are using them.
Definitely, if we are going to go the pseudo-ground unit route I would not want to lose the ability to use carriers in orbit to support the ground. Though I think this might start running afoul of the C# aurora "no special rules" paradigm.
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Since people seem to be gunning for air as a ground unit type I'm left wondering what would be their specialty vs the other vehicle types besides interaction with AA? Attacks rear-echelon and support formations unless providing support for a frontline unit? What about targeting rules when there is enemy air involved? What about unit capabilities for these air units? I don't think "jungle fighters" works in this context, as funny as the pun may be.
It's surely some programming work for Steve, but I think you mostly move the existing GSF rules and mechanics into an aircraft GU class as far as targeting rules, probably modifying a bit so that AA in a targeted formation does an appreciable amount of mitigation and counter-attack. I think an aircraft class should have a fairly large size (aircraft may only be ~10 tons, but we have to account for the amount of maintenance and support crew+equipment to be shipped around with them) and limited armor options, probably similar weapons choices to LVH as well. Targeting enemy air would probably work similar to how counter-battery fire currently does. As far as unit capabilities, same rules as apply to other non-INF types should work well enough.
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Since people seem to be gunning for air as a ground unit type I'm left wondering what would be their specialty vs the other vehicle types besides interaction with AA? Attacks rear-echelon and support formations unless providing support for a frontline unit? What about targeting rules when there is enemy air involved? What about unit capabilities for these air units? I don't think "jungle fighters" works in this context, as funny as the pun may be.
It's surely some programming work for Steve, but I think you mostly move the existing GSF rules and mechanics into an aircraft GU class as far as targeting rules, probably modifying a bit so that AA in a targeted formation does an appreciable amount of mitigation and counter-attack. I think an aircraft class should have a fairly large size (aircraft may only be ~10 tons, but we have to account for the amount of maintenance and support crew+equipment to be shipped around with them) and limited armor options, probably similar weapons choices to LVH as well. Targeting enemy air would probably work similar to how counter-battery fire currently does. As far as unit capabilities, same rules as apply to other non-INF types should work well enough.
IMHO, the biggest job will be on balancing rather than create ad-hoc rules, and, of course, some works is required.
As Nuclear said, all ingredients are there, including evasion which could be a factor against AA? Fighters could have more and Bombers less?
Regarding the "Jungle fighter" you could imagine being either the loadout or the structural plane changes required to be effective. For instance the "jungle fighter" uses napalm while the high or low gravity will suffer or gain evasion.
Eventually, air ground units won't get any fortification.
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Eventually, air ground units won't get any fortification.
This should probably depend on where they are based - assuming that is allowed, air GUs I imagine could typically base both on (presumably) airfields on the ground in a defensive context, and out of carriers in orbit in an offensive context.
The former would be more numerous but be vulnerable to artillery on the ground hitting their (presumed) airfields whereas the ones based on carriers in orbit are only hurt (outside of AA) if an STO or something else hits their mothership (I'm imagining the formation in this case being tied to the ship and not individual fighters). In the former case I can see fortification coming into play (this doesn't just have to be bunkers but could be stuff like C-RAMs being installed on the airfield).
You could also make airfields an installation to add air GU capacity to prevent massive CAS spam that makes aviation on offense worthless. Still cheaper and more efficient than a carrier in orbit but still requiring some sort of investment on the part of the defender.
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What is this urge to take over an existing thread about X and make it about Y? This is the second of my ground combat threads where this exact thing has happened :P
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What is this urge to take over an existing thread about X and make it about Y? This is the second of my ground combat threads where this exact thing has happened :P
I blame Droll:
I think the main thing regarding combat not working well that I have mentioned an inordinate amount of times by now is CAS and the overall AA implementation. I'm not sure if AA is overpowered but thanks to micromanagement issues (which I think will persist mostly in the current state of 2.2) means that CAS cannot be fielded in enough numbers compared to AA units - which of course results in annihilation for anything in the air.
:P
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Sorry to keep on the CAS topic, but I'm going to anyway..
Is the current problem an issue of mechanics, or an issue of balance / scale mis-match?
Would tens of fighters be expected to make much difference in multi-million ton land battle in the first place? I feel like in terms of cost per unit, and speed, fighters are out of place in planetary combat in the first place. That makes me feel like the damage and armour are mis-matched as well.
I kind of like the mechanics the way they are, just not the micromanagement.
I'm just spitballing here, but what about a re-balance of fighter stats when operating in ground combat, combined with some QOL to help manage assigning them. After all, 1km/s is faster than most fighters today. I'm imagining hangars filled with loads (hundreds?) of fighters that are all tiny compared to space fighters, that are still able to actually survive and have an impact in ground combat due to stats being buffed. Managed with some QOL tools to auto assign squadrons to go and support ground formations, or go on interdictions tasks.
I don't know, as I've not really messed around with CAS myself. My feel is that it's a balance and micromanagement problem though, not that the CAS mechanics are broken per-se. (Well, other than AI not using them).
Please explain how I'm wrong if I am.
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Sorry to keep on the CAS topic, but I'm going to anyway..
Such is the way of the forum, this it always has been, and thus it always will be... :P
Is the current problem an issue of mechanics, or an issue of balance / scale mis-match?
Both. In some cases the mechanics more or less force a balance issue which cannot be resolved since those mechanics are present in other parts of the game, unless you change the mechanics entirely.
An example is AA damage, which is modeled basically as a missile hit with a certain damage value. The only way to solve the problems here RE: armor penetration and shock damage is to rebalance those mechanics for the entire game, which is excessive. The way AA weapon damage is calculated is also not really balanceable unless we change it entirely - right now, for example, LAA is useless until Racial Attack tech level 10 or higher, but due to quadratic scaling AA damage (particularly MAA, since HAA is not as widespread) quickly becomes overwhelming beyond this. The ends of the scale are both too extreme by nature of the mechanic design, it is not a simple tweaking-of-numbers problem.
Would tens of fighters be expected to make much difference in multi-million ton land battle in the first place? I feel like in terms of cost per unit, and speed, fighters are out of place in planetary combat in the first place. That makes me feel like the damage and armour are mis-matched as well.
To be honest, this is an argument in favor of a new GU class, which is the easiest way to resolve these mismatches.
The "tens of fighters" issue is actually as much a logistical/strategic problem as a micromanagement problem, as to be frank actually developing the carrier/deployment capacity to bring 100s or 1000s of fighters to a ground invasion is almost prohibitively expensive... notably, unlike troop transports it doesn't really work to build GSF carriers as commercial vessels because the fighters need to be maintained which requires military hangar bays. As building a large dedicated wing of GSF carriers is usually going to be impractical this limits the use of large GSF forces to fleets which already have carriers and can swap the fighter loadouts as needed.
However, at this point... does it really make sense that only a few very rich and arguably over-developed navies can deploy an air force, when in real life air forces are a critical element of every major military force? Why is such an ubiquitous combat arm locked behind so many gates and hurdles? By making air forces into another GU class you resolve this problem as well.
I'm just spitballing here, but what about a re-balance of fighter stats when operating in ground combat, combined with some QOL to help manage assigning them. After all, 1km/s is faster than most fighters today. I'm imagining hangars filled with loads (hundreds?) of fighters that are all tiny compared to space fighters, that are still able to actually survive and have an impact in ground combat due to stats being buffed. Managed with some QOL tools to auto assign squadrons to go and support ground formations, or go on interdictions tasks.
The problem is, how do you do this without creating exceptions to the existing fighter mechanics? Analogously, the major reason that fighters in Aurora are not tiny (~10-ton) space-based analogues of airplanes - unlike in most sci-fi settings - is because it creates exceptions in the rule where tiny fighters can bear far more firepower (per ton) than large vessels, which doesn't make sense (if, for example, a 2-ton fighter autocannon is as effective as a 300-ton Gauss cannon, what prevents large ships from mounting dozens of the 2-ton weapon instead?).
Under the current rules, I've generally found that you can create fighter pods which are about as efficient as the corresponding ground component (B, AC, or AA types) if they are about the same size as said component (e.g., ~20 tons for light and ~40 tons for medium). This practically limits GSFs to around the 50 to 100-ton range depending how heavily you want them to hit. If you want to push GSFs down to about 10 or 20 tons, you need to have effective fighter pods which are significantly more size-efficient than the corresponding ground components, which is the same kind of problem I described above. If you instead use an aircraft GU class, it is very straightforward to implement mechanics which are naturally balanced and self-consistent, once the actual mechanics are coded in for air units (which I will acknowledge is a big pile of work for Steve).
I don't know, as I've not really messed around with CAS myself. My feel is that it's a balance and micromanagement problem though, not that the CAS mechanics are broken per-se. (Well, other than AI not using them).
Related to the AI non-usage problem, another big issue is that with the current mechanics, only one side can use an air force and it is the side which has space superiority - in practice, always the attackers as space superiority is required to launch a planetary invasion. This means a defender can pretty much never deploy an air force which is pretty limiting (and makes AA basically pointless for offensive formations, which is silly). If air forces can be modeled by ground formations a lot more space opens up for use of air forces generally, which is at least a big benefit for roleplay.
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Good points. Thanks for taking the time to type that out.
Under the current rules, I've generally found that you can create fighter pods which are about as efficient as the corresponding ground component (B, AC, or AA types) if they are about the same size as said component (e.g., ~20 tons for light and ~40 tons for medium). This practically limits GSFs to around the 50 to 100-ton range depending how heavily you want them to hit. If you want to push GSFs down to about 10 or 20 tons, you need to have effective fighter pods which are significantly more size-efficient than the corresponding ground components, which is the same kind of problem I described above. If you instead use an aircraft GU class, it is very straightforward to implement mechanics which are naturally balanced and self-consistent, once the actual mechanics are coded in for air units (which I will acknowledge is a big pile of work for Steve).
I think this here is a key part I hadn't thought much about. It guess it makes sense that a pod be the same effectiveness as the same tonnage of GU weapon. In my head, the fighter pods could be a couple of tons on a spacecraft and compete with a tank cannon. I guess because in real life a tank cannon doesn't weigh 50 tonnes.
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I think this here is a key part I hadn't thought much about. It guess it makes sense that a pod be the same effectiveness as the same tonnage of GU weapon. In my head, the fighter pods could be a couple of tons on a spacecraft and compete with a tank cannon. I guess because in real life a tank cannon doesn't weigh 50 tonnes.
Canonically, the tonnages for ground units in Aurora are meant to reflect the amount of mass or volume needed to transport the unit to a battlefield or deployment posting, which means it includes things like crew, weapons, ammunition, supplies, fuel, gear, etc. This is why a INF+PW, which is basically just a guy with an assault rifle, takes 5 tons instead of, like, 0.1 tons. When I say "canonically" I mean "Steve has said that he looked up these kinds of numbers when he wrote the GU tables in the DB", although I don't have a link ready at hand.
This is yet another abstraction that doesn't work super well for GSFs in the current model, but would make good sense for an aircraft GU class as all of that tonnage for a "50-ton fighter" is a 10-ton aircraft and 40 tons of grounds crew and equipment back at the airbase.
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I think this here is a key part I hadn't thought much about. It guess it makes sense that a pod be the same effectiveness as the same tonnage of GU weapon. In my head, the fighter pods could be a couple of tons on a spacecraft and compete with a tank cannon. I guess because in real life a tank cannon doesn't weigh 50 tonnes.
This is yet another abstraction that doesn't work super well for GSFs in the current model, but would make good sense for an aircraft GU class as all of that tonnage for a "50-ton fighter" is a 10-ton aircraft and 40 tons of grounds crew and equipment back at the airbase.
Well, this would be understandable if the aircrafts didn't have radar cross-section and signature
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What is this urge to take over an existing thread about X and make it about Y? This is the second of my ground combat threads where this exact thing has happened :P
I blame Droll
You'll never take me alive!
Jokes aside I probably do need to chill on the CAS problem, I've mentioned it quite a few times across multiple threads now.
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Nah, it's fine, the CAS/GSF issue is a major problem that does need fixing. It's just completely divorced from the problem&solutions I'm proposing here. And it's funny that this is the second this derailment has happened to a ground combat thread of mine.
I've previously been opposed to the "air force as separate GU type" but I've changed my mind - the reasons have pretty well been explained in this thread to. What is annoying but doable for space combat is painful and impossible for ground combat. And one problem that hasn't been brought up is that every AAA can fire at every GSF because geography (and thus horizon) is not a thing, again a thing that promotes "air force as separate GU type" over them being actual fighter-type ships modelled like every other ship in Aurora. I mean, I understand why Steve did it that way, it's the logical thing to do but reality has by now shown that it isn't really the best way.
However, there are few issues that needs to be solved. First of all, we need to be careful to be fairly specific on what an "air unit" is. Because remember combat can occur on barren rocks without an atmosphere, as well as Venusian hellholes with 300x Earth's atmosphere. A normal jet engine is not going to do the trick. Now this isn't a problem for all the other units because the locomotion is left up to the imagination of the player. LVH can be a jeep and VEH can be a truck and a HVH can be a tracked tank but they could as well be a helicopter, a walking mech and an anti-gravity using floating orb shooting lightning. Or steampunk machines or whatever you want them to be. Air units will require a little more work in the 'handwavium department'. And they would also need to not be a copy of heavy bombardment and/or long-range bombardment. Those can already attack any enemy formation on the body which means they probably utilize not just ballistic artillery but cruise/ballistic/supersonic/sci-fi missiles. What would make an air unit mechanically different from HB and MBL?
Remember, there is no point for Steve to spend his limited time on making something that does not offer anything new mechanically. Adding a unit type that can only work in certain atmosphere compositions that does the same thing as HB and MBL but does 10% less collateral damage but is vulnerable to AAA? Yeah, probably not different enough to justify its existence unless Steve somehow falls in love with the concept.
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What would make an air unit mechanically different from HB and MBL?
Remember, there is no point for Steve to spend his limited time on making something that does not offer anything new mechanically. Adding a unit type that can only work in certain atmosphere compositions that does the same thing as HB and MBL but does 10% less collateral damage but is vulnerable to AAA? Yeah, probably not different enough to justify its existence unless Steve somehow falls in love with the concept.
I would actually think of air units as able to bring MB/HB targeting mechanics with other kinds of weapons (CAP, AC, AV, AA possibly in an intercept role), which is basically the role of GSFs right now (except we do not have AV fighter pods).
I do suppose the "air units in different/no atmosphere" thing is a bit tricky, but to be honest it is not like current ground units are at all immune from such handwavium. I highly doubt for instance that an infantryman with basic body armor specced for Earth combat is equipped to survive zero-G, zero-atm asteroid combat and 40-atm Venus combat as well, but we can handwave that our units are re-equipped for their deployment zone behind the scenes. I think air units would just fold into these kinds of cases, for instance swapping out different types of engines while at base, maybe in real life that is impractical but then so are giant laser turret battleships in space.
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What would make an air unit mechanically different from HB and MBL?
Remember, there is no point for Steve to spend his limited time on making something that does not offer anything new mechanically. Adding a unit type that can only work in certain atmosphere compositions that does the same thing as HB and MBL but does 10% less collateral damage but is vulnerable to AAA? Yeah, probably not different enough to justify its existence unless Steve somehow falls in love with the concept.
I would actually think of air units as able to bring MB/HB targeting mechanics with other kinds of weapons (CAP, AC, AV, AA possibly in an intercept role), which is basically the role of GSFs right now (except we do not have AV fighter pods).
I do suppose the "air units in different/no atmosphere" thing is a bit tricky, but to be honest it is not like current ground units are at all immune from such handwavium. I highly doubt for instance that an infantryman with basic body armor specced for Earth combat is equipped to survive zero-G, zero-atm asteroid combat and 40-atm Venus combat as well, but we can handwave that our units are re-equipped for their deployment zone behind the scenes. I think air units would just fold into these kinds of cases, for instance swapping out different types of engines while at base, maybe in real life that is impractical but then so are giant laser turret battleships in space.
Capabilities sort of cover this high/low grav, extreme pressure etc. But otherwise yeah I think it's important that the air GSFs actually have some sort of unique offensive niche instead of just "vehicle but dies to AA instead of AT".
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As much as I love the idea of being able to design conventional aircraft, I'm not sure if adds any meaningful gameplay decisions to ground unit design. Bringing in a quote from another thread:
I think this is what people tend to miss with the ground combat mechanics. Ground combat in Aurora is designed to simulate at the operational and strategic level, not the small-unit tactical level that is ubiquitous in military science fiction. The granularity of ground formations is really more of a roleplay tool which mechanically supports this goal, albeit with a few cases that it still doesn't quite hit the mark yet but Steve improves the mechanics in every patch so it is getting closer with every release.
Extending this argument a bit to conventional air power, I don't see that inserting another ground unit type adds much when the current mechanics support roleplaying <vehicle> types as aircraft. For example, strategic bombers could be modeled as artillery, with strategic AA or dedicated interception squadrons as counter-battery. CAS and its vulnerability to ground fire is easily mapped onto light vehicles in frontline attack. The occasional hits AP weapons inflict on heavier armor can be thought of as organic AA that's below the resolution of the unit designer (e. g. MANPADs carried by an infantry team otherwise equipped with PWs).
From this perspective, the current "AA" role is more like a souped-up version of strategic AA or missile defense that may not be able to engage anything below several thousands of meters.
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As much as I love the idea of being able to design conventional aircraft, I'm not sure if adds any meaningful gameplay decisions to ground unit design. Bringing in a quote from another thread:
Extending this argument a bit to conventional air power, I don't see that inserting another ground unit type adds much when the current mechanics support roleplaying <vehicle> types as aircraft. For example, strategic bombers could be modeled as artillery, with strategic AA or dedicated interception squadrons as counter-battery. CAS and its vulnerability to ground fire is easily mapped onto light vehicles in frontline attack. The occasional hits AP weapons inflict on heavier armor can be thought of as organic AA that's below the resolution of the unit designer (e. g. MANPADs carried by an infantry team otherwise equipped with PWs).
From this perspective, the current "AA" role is more like a souped-up version of strategic AA or missile defense that may not be able to engage anything below several thousands of meters.
Alternate take: we already have a ground support fighter (GSF) mechanic, which does occupy a space between ground-to-ground and space-to-ground, and the fact that no one is really saying "let's take this out of the game entirely" does indicate that it adds meaningful gameplay - or at least that people think it would if it worked worth a damn. Mechanically, the idea of a flight-capable unit type would be to keep the same or a parallel set of mechanics, and just reframe that in terms of a ground unit class to eliminate most of the reasons why the current GSF mechanic doesn't work (unreasonable micro, poorly-scaling logistics, clash between AA and ship-to-ship combat mechanics, etc.).
In terms of gameplay role, I think the comparison has to made against the heavy bombardment (HB) component type as this is the parallel the existing GSF mechanics draw (sharing the same targeting rules). In this case, a GSF/air force mechanic provides the ability to strike in a HB-like manner with non-bombardment weapons (AV, CAP, AC, etc.) while only being countered by the presence and firing of enemy AA units (providing an interesting defensive decision - how much AA, and how to distribute it? - which goes beyond the existing aggregate damage mechanics and adds a new dimension to force composition). Presumably this is balanced by any number of factors - build cost of the base unit class, fragility in armor/HP, large transport size representing extensive basing requirements, etc. I think there are plenty of options to make these an interesting and unique unit class from the mechanics perspective which is not too dissimilar from the current GSFs.
Besides, even if it is not mechanically distinctive, I think it is an important roleplay niche to enable air force modeling in a way the current GSF system has so far not lived up to. As someone who does like to model his ground forces in some detail, I don't like the idea that a LAV is both anti-tank and "anti-air", simply put a FGM-148 Javelin and a FIM-92 Stinger are not the same thing at all beyond both being man-portable launched missiles, nor does it really work for roleplay consistency if a LVH+CAP is an APC but a LVH+LAC is an A-10 Warthog equivalent.
The challenge of course is no matter what is done, much programming is needed to implement this on Steve's part, including revising the ground combat rules to accommodate this new unit class which could run afoul of the "reduce exceptions" principle for C#. As Steve has not much commented on the subject I am not sure how he feels about that.
As an aside: I would still like to see one mechanic from the existing GSF implementation preserved. While fighters should play by the same rules as all the other spaceships, I'd like to see the ability to link a squadron of several fighters to a single FFD unit preserved, so there are sensible alternatives for naval bombardment besides using the biggest battleships you can find.
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Small necro to this since I only stalk this forum every now and then, but would love to see more ground combat love.
Someone brought up manpower, and I think that could be a good place to start. Someone may say "but even the largest armies only use maybe a million soldiers in the game", but those are frontline soldiers. Consider that the modern military is something like 1:7 for combat vs support personnel, and then probably like 1:10 for military personnel vs civilian bureaucrat staff and you can get like a 1:70 multiplier for population needed to "support" a formation in Aurora. This could potentially approach the point where population becomes a reasonable limiting factor on formation size and maybe push between two design choices of quality vs. quantity that we see a bunch in wargames.
As for planes, I think that would be redundant as far as GSF goes, unless it's like literally just a unit that ground factories can make that would operate similarly to GSFs. Air combat needs a rework in general and seems largely unfinished still, so it's hard to say at this point. Personally I just really want to see the "vertical envelopment" mechanics someone else posted on the forum in the suggestions thread, if nothing else because I want to play Ride of the Valykries while my first cav dropships annihilate the aliens.
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I'll go along with revitalizing this thread: People really like fighters, and GSF are just way too micro-intensive. Not to diminish Steve's work in making the mechanic, sometimes an experiment just doesn't produce the results you're hoping for.
Since people seem to be gunning for air as a ground unit type I'm left wondering what would be their specialty vs the other vehicle types besides interaction with AA? Attacks rear-echelon and support formations unless providing support for a frontline unit? What about targeting rules when there is enemy air involved? What about unit capabilities for these air units? I don't think "jungle fighters" works in this context, as funny as the pun may be.
It's surely some programming work for Steve, but I think you mostly move the existing GSF rules and mechanics into an aircraft GU class as far as targeting rules, probably modifying a bit so that AA in a targeted formation does an appreciable amount of mitigation and counter-attack. I think an aircraft class should have a fairly large size (aircraft may only be ~10 tons, but we have to account for the amount of maintenance and support crew+equipment to be shipped around with them) and limited armor options, probably similar weapons choices to LVH as well. Targeting enemy air would probably work similar to how counter-battery fire currently does. As far as unit capabilities, same rules as apply to other non-INF types should work well enough.
This isn't thinking about unit types in the fill in the blanks with your imagination style that Steve prefers.
Thinking more along those lines, I actually think 'flyer' would be quite simple to implement:
Make 'aerospace' a capability similar to 'Boarding Combat' - this capability could be connected to any vehicle type.
The capability would do the following:
- Provide superior evasion either a simple HitMod*0.1, or (Hitmod^2)*0.1 - flyers are fast/high and hard to hit; AA weapons should inherently ignore this modifier and revert to HitMod
- Reduce armor by a factor of 0.25 - the main problem with flying platforms is they need lift, more of their structure is given of to that relative to armor.
- Increase GSP Resupply Cost by a factor of ~2.5 maybe depending on technology - Flyers eat fuel.
- They cannot benefit from Fortification - a flyer may sit in an underground hangar, but if it is its not fighting
This achieves 2.5 things:
- It continues Steve's design philosophy that labels are roleplay-agnostic.
Use a Light Vehicle to imagine an ornithopter or an unmanned drone; Super-Heavy can be anything from steampunk attack-blimps to flying Gundams; whatever you can imagine. - You (Steve) would barely need to mess around with unit types or weapon types!
- Fit your 'aerospace heavy vehicle' with bombardment weapons if you want it to be a durable, RE-stationed bomber
- Fit your 'aerospace light vehicle' with Light AA if you want a front-line interceptor designed to take on other flyers.
- As an extension of [2] you fix the 'AA Horizon' problem: AA units are now only engaging hostile forces that their formation is in combat with, and their combat doesn't need a separate mechanic
Hell if you want to go crazy, forget about GSF having their own mechanics altogether, and fold them into normal Ground Combat: Allow fighters to be assigned (as a group) to any formation in your OOB, and simply count them as S-Heavy vehicles with their weapon loadout counting as something equivalent to the weapon tonnage, an armor of Heavy Vehicle * Armor_build_material_tier, and the Aerospace capability. That would let you deploy your space fighters on the ground without needing to individually assign them to an FFD, and you could still divide them up by placing 10 of them in this formation or 20 of them in that formation as support or all 200 fighters as their own unit, whatever you want.
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I'll go along with revitalizing this thread: People really like fighters, and GSF are just way too micro-intensive. Not to diminish Steve's work in making the mechanic, sometimes an experiment just doesn't produce the results you're hoping for.
Since people seem to be gunning for air as a ground unit type I'm left wondering what would be their specialty vs the other vehicle types besides interaction with AA? Attacks rear-echelon and support formations unless providing support for a frontline unit? What about targeting rules when there is enemy air involved? What about unit capabilities for these air units? I don't think "jungle fighters" works in this context, as funny as the pun may be.
It's surely some programming work for Steve, but I think you mostly move the existing GSF rules and mechanics into an aircraft GU class as far as targeting rules, probably modifying a bit so that AA in a targeted formation does an appreciable amount of mitigation and counter-attack. I think an aircraft class should have a fairly large size (aircraft may only be ~10 tons, but we have to account for the amount of maintenance and support crew+equipment to be shipped around with them) and limited armor options, probably similar weapons choices to LVH as well. Targeting enemy air would probably work similar to how counter-battery fire currently does. As far as unit capabilities, same rules as apply to other non-INF types should work well enough.
This isn't thinking about unit types in the fill in the blanks with your imagination style that Steve prefers.
Thinking more along those lines, I actually think 'flyer' would be quite simple to implement:
Make 'aerospace' a capability similar to 'Boarding Combat' - this capability could be connected to any vehicle type.
The capability would do the following:
- Provide superior evasion either a simple HitMod*0.1, or (Hitmod^2)*0.1 - flyers are fast/high and hard to hit; AA weapons should inherently ignore this modifier and revert to HitMod
- Reduce armor by a factor of 0.25 - the main problem with flying platforms is they need lift, more of their structure is given of to that relative to armor.
- Increase GSP Resupply Cost by a factor of ~2.5 maybe depending on technology - Flyers eat fuel.
- They cannot benefit from Fortification - a flyer may sit in an underground hangar, but if it is its not fighting
This achieves 2.5 things:
- It continues Steve's design philosophy that labels are roleplay-agnostic.
Use a Light Vehicle to imagine an ornithopter or an unmanned drone; Super-Heavy can be anything from steampunk attack-blimps to flying Gundams; whatever you can imagine. - You (Steve) would barely need to mess around with unit types or weapon types!
- Fit your 'aerospace heavy vehicle' with bombardment weapons if you want it to be a durable, RE-stationed bomber
- Fit your 'aerospace light vehicle' with Light AA if you want a front-line interceptor designed to take on other flyers.
- As an extension of [2] you fix the 'AA Horizon' problem: AA units are now only engaging hostile forces that their formation is in combat with, and their combat doesn't need a separate mechanic
Hell if you want to go crazy, forget about GSF having their own mechanics altogether, and fold them into normal Ground Combat: Allow fighters to be assigned (as a group) to any formation in your OOB, and simply count them as S-Heavy vehicles with their weapon loadout counting as something equivalent to the weapon tonnage, an armor of Heavy Vehicle * Armor_build_material_tier, and the Aerospace capability. That would let you deploy your space fighters on the ground without needing to individually assign them to an FFD, and you could still divide them up by placing 10 of them in this formation or 20 of them in that formation as support or all 200 fighters as their own unit, whatever you want.
I really like the airplane approach here. I love the general roleplay agnostic approach, and while you can technically just name ground vehicles as airplanes at the moment, without separate mechanics it's indeed a stretch of the imagination.
Personally though I think space fighters, GSF, and ground "air vehicles" need to all have the same mechanics and keep their separate "domain" that they have currently, just with mechanics fleshed out.
I haven't played too much with them, but if I understand right, is a lot of the macro just assigning them to FFD?
We have squadrons now so just having a "assign squadron support" option to a formation would solve this, essentially just automatically splitting fighters among all FFD in a chosen formation and lower, and if there's more FFD than fighters, equally distributing them as best as possible.
This should clear up as much micro as possible while allowing granularity, eg, if you want something more specific, you can do this assign all approach and move a few fighters around, but over all micro is reduced and outside of a few niche players who want that control, suits the needs of what most people want out of air support.
But personally I just love the space/ground overlap with fighters from a roleplay standpoint, since it's such a strong theme in scifi (TIE Fighters in Star Wars, napalm bombing runs in Starship Troopers)
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Make 'aerospace' a capability similar to 'Boarding Combat' - this capability could be connected to any vehicle type.
The capability would do the following:
- Provide superior evasion either a simple HitMod*0.1, or (Hitmod^2)*0.1 - flyers are fast/high and hard to hit; AA weapons should inherently ignore this modifier and revert to HitMod
- Reduce armor by a factor of 0.25 - the main problem with flying platforms is they need lift, more of their structure is given of to that relative to armor.
- Increase GSP Resupply Cost by a factor of ~2.5 maybe depending on technology - Flyers eat fuel.
- They cannot benefit from Fortification - a flyer may sit in an underground hangar, but if it is its not fighting
This achieves 2.5 things:
- It continues Steve's design philosophy that labels are roleplay-agnostic.
Use a Light Vehicle to imagine an ornithopter or an unmanned drone; Super-Heavy can be anything from steampunk attack-blimps to flying Gundams; whatever you can imagine. - You (Steve) would barely need to mess around with unit types or weapon types!
- Fit your 'aerospace heavy vehicle' with bombardment weapons if you want it to be a durable, RE-stationed bomber
- Fit your 'aerospace light vehicle' with Light AA if you want a front-line interceptor designed to take on other flyers.
- As an extension of [2] you fix the 'AA Horizon' problem: AA units are now only engaging hostile forces that their formation is in combat with, and their combat doesn't need a separate mechanic
This is the most elegant solution I have seen so far. The least work from a programming perspective while allowing for the maximum RP, as is the point of this game. I really like how this solution easily allows you to use any weapon you normally would, so you can make your Interceptors, AC 130 Gunships all the way up to air battleships, armed with several AV and Artillery weapons. Just one button and it's sorted.
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definitely would need to reduce hit points in addition to armor. many quality designs rely on a combination of evasion and hit points for survival as armor is expensive and those things are free. cap or hcap light vehicles are already quite strong among attacking options, and multiplying their survival by a factor of nearly ten for a cost increase of (presumably) 100% would revolutionize ground combat.
despite the elegance of the suggestion, it seems to me that many unintended consequences would be avoided at a small cost in effort if the more prosaic approach of simply defining one or a few "aerospace" unit types were taken instead.
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despite the elegance of the suggestion, it seems to me that many unintended consequences would be avoided at a small cost in effort if the more prosaic approach of simply defining one or a few "aerospace" unit types were taken instead.
Everything has unintended consequences, that's the nature of Aurora.
Anyways, I think its worth making its own thread, so I'll do that to stop derailing this one quite so badly. My apologies to Garfunkel