I know it has been discussed previously and with the removal of ground fighters in the upcoming version, I thought I would throw out my suggestion for possible implementation of Air Forces.
My suggestion is predicated on using the existing ground force framework rather than something new; and for it to present interesting force composition choices to the player.
The new air units utilize the existing base unit types excepting infantry/static.
Air units are distinguished from other units by using a âflyingâ capability.
The flying capability will be expensive (2.0 cost or more) - this will keep the amount of the air units, particularly the larger and more capable versions, lower due to their cost.
Other capabilities can be added such as High-G, Low-G, Extreme #. Obvioulsy genetic, boarding, and other ground types are not usable for these units.
Flying units can only be engaged at full strength by AA weapons. Autocannons can be used at x0.5 modifier, and all other weapons at x0.1 modifier. Weapons fire from flying units will be applied at the regular rate. This will inspire purpose made AAA units to be constructed - it will also diversify aircraft types with dedicated air to air fighters and air to ground units. Bombardement/Artillery cannot be used on flying units.
Flying units use supply at an increased rate in excess of other unit types. This increases the âcostâ of maintaining air units in combat.
Flying units have a unique ability to target units in the front, support, and rear positions. They can be assigned in direct support to a front line unit like artillery current is, but otherwise they will pick a unit during the targeting phase and attack it with a bias towards other flying units and AA units.
This is the rough outline of my idea. I think it creates some interesting choices, particularly in composition. As in real life, if you have air superiority and facing a foe without air cover or triple AAA, you are going to do a great deal of damage to a decisive degree. However, if the enemy has a substansial investment in air power and/or AAA forces, than it is going to be rough go even with aerial forces.
This is very similar to my past suggestion(s) on the topic. I think the only major differences were that I suggest that flying units have extra evasion, which AA components ignore (vs. your point #5) and I have never suggested the increased supply use (I donât know that itâs needed, but itâs not a bad idea either).
I would personally prefer to be able to field flying infantry, but thatâs just me (Valkyries! Jetpacks! Geonosians!), though that feels like a separate tech from vehicular flightâŚ
If it werenât so clunky and cluttering to have five different âflightâ abilities in the capability list, it could be interesting to have to progress through LVH flight â VEH flight â HVH flight etc., though, again, that might be getting too granular.
I would probably add to the list above that units with flying capability donât add to the occupation/garrison value of a world (or they do it at a fractional rate) so as to further incentivize keeping ground forces around. An Infantry Battalion SHOULD count more for providing security rather than Aerial Squadron.
This is already the case. Infantry provide better security than vehicle classes on account of being smaller and, usually, cheaper per individual unit. Flight capability would only increase that difference by being more expensive.
I like how you have the different weapon types working, I never thought of them having different modifiers.
I was thinking that maybe air units could have their combat effectiveness (maybe their chance to target a unit / chance to be targeted) multiplied by the atmospheric pressure, or some formula related to the atmospheric pressure. This simulates flying units actually using the atmosphere to fly, and also means you have to think strategically about which units get deployed where. I figure that if your vehicle doesnât need an atmosphere to fly, then it should just fly in space above the range of AA, which just makes it an orbital bombardment vehicle.
I have a similar idea for sea units (using hydro extent) which I was about to suggest on the old forum before it went down. Iâll make my own thread for it soon.
Me too. Maybe a kind of power armour that gives evasion (like nuclearslurpee said) or breakthrough or something?
Not all ground battles happen in Atmo though. Battle for Luna for exampleâŚ
Adding a capability/modifier to vehicles should work fine, then the existing modules would be easily ported as well. Want a Air Dominance Craft, Med Veh - Flyer MAA -LAA, want an A-10 Hvy Veh - HAC-HAV-HAV double the cost, reduce max armor by 1 level (So Med would have Light Vehicle Armour, Light Vehicle would be akin to Infantry) and no Fort bonus possible.
I am going to be a heretic here, so get your torches and your pitchforks out.
Air power is overrated.
Military strategists have promised victory through bombs as long as we have bombs.
They never delivered.
As recent events here on earth show, air superiority is great for devastating the enemy and creating wastelands.
Aurora has starships for that.
Actually taking real estate while it is reasonably intact still needs boots on the ground, if you are dealing with a determined opponent.
And by the way: Who is to say your vehicles donât have flight?
Since the other guy has access to the same types of capabilities it doesnât matter.
Of course jetfighters vs biplanes matters.
But so does machineguns versus muskets.
You arenât wrong, but I do think thereâs at least some utility in having some degree of âairâ unit on the ground, simply because it gives some extra variety in ground unit setup. âVictory through bombsâ is an impossibility, but it doesnât mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. Personally, I find that having some form of air unit, whatever that may ultimately entail, offers some variety of interesting choices regarding ground force composition that makes it worth including.
I joined Aurora about one update before the old air support system was scrapped and I did miss it a little before I came around to my current thinking.
Which is:
The sheer size of a planet and the timetable on which planetary invasions play out to me means, that Aurora âgroundâ forces are at the very least airmobile.
Any at least semi-professional force that is airmobile will include some form of air-combat capability, even if it is in the form of anti-air only (the effectivity of anti-air was the aircraftâs demise in Aurora)
David Drakeâs âHammerâs Slammersâ novels model such a force to my great satisfaction.
You have infantry riding jet sleds and fusion powered hovertanks, which provide deadly air defense and so - no aircraft.
Definite must read IMO.
Aircraft would be up against some stiff competition from space too, both on the defending side (there is a battleship in orbit, just a few hundred km away, with guns that are able to hit targets at tens of thousands km. Targets that would move a lot faster than any aircraft could ever hope to do and dodge just as well. About the only defense would be hiding in the clutter on the ground. Something which infantry and to a lesser degree tanks are good at. Aircraft⌠not so much.)
and on the attacking side (why waste tonnage on the troop transport, when there is a battleship in orbitâŚ).
Still. If the pro-aircraft side can come up with a convinving model, Iâd be all ears.
In the sense that once 2.8 releases, the game is perfect. No more changes are needed, other than bugfixes for any bugs introduced. It is exactly what I want it to be.
Are there âmoreâ things that could be added? Sure. There are always more things that could be tweaked or added. However, at least as far as my goals are concerned, I need nothing else. I find myself with so many games âwaiting for the next updateâ, where the desire to play the game in the state it is currently in is completely shut out by the desire to play the promise of what the next update holds. Once 2.8 is out, Aurora will no longer have that for me, for it will have everything it ever needed for me in that version.
As for me (and my perception of the game is determined in a large part by my active ongoing experience in the current high-intensity ground and âlittoral-airâ warfare), air capability needs returning athmo shielding from space weapons.
That is, Walter is absolutely right: matured space weapons should negate automatically any attempts to fly anything detectable and worth hitting from space, and for me it would be a bit hard to believe in any âflying fortressesâ-like air force at an airless space colony especially and Earth-like atmo also.
So, Iâd suggest the following:
Keep air force relatively cheap and make itâs main downside in their cost, not element dimensions.
Without an atmo, orbital bombardments are devastating for any ground units, large elements especially, flying elements including, with the downside that itâs devastating for the lootable infrastructure too, and inflicts friendly fire losses (about 0.1 probability factor for the frontline troops when the GFs are in active egagement, 0.01 when they are both defensive, rear elements being safe).
The more atmo thikness (atmo density * body diameter) the less GF damage, AF including, and also less collateral damage (though Iâd set it diminishing 2 times slower, bacause athmo affects aiming as well as delivered effect).
Earth 1 atmo at about 0.2 base factor, venusian one makes bombardments nearly useless. I think this is really worth bothering, because itâs a new decision factor: you may choose infrastructure colonies at venusian or other extreme athmo bodies specifically because itâs easier there to hide and defend when having no strong space superiority. Natural points for extensive groung warfare.
Effects depend on the weapon armour-piercing capability (Lasers are about 2 times less affected, Mesons up to 5 or 10 times less). Gives Mesons an interesting additional niche.
StO weapons suffer from the same effect (it doesnât make StO so much less effective, because they are both weakened and shielded, and their survivability is a great factor of their effectiveness, so setting strong Meson StO at a venusian world may be a good idea despite their slower effect).
P.S. I think the future of ground warfare is more like UNDERground actually. Littoral unmanned air force is a thing I cannot forget about anymore - too many dead bodies seen nearly every day, hunted easily from the air, both enemy and ours. In Aurora, I think itâs natural to view basic ground elements (âinfantryâ) as low-altitude-flying-capable troops - operating numerous small combat UAVs as their main weapon, yet itâs ok to not elaborate wich exactly types of weapons they do have, aside of their size and which targets itâs specialized for.
I would have to consider this in more depth but I do like the idea of some sort of atmospheric effect on Space to Ground (STG) bombardement. That would make ground/aerial forces more vulnerable in âmoon colonyâ with no athmosphere but more resilient in heavy atmopshere colonies. I think it would also make an interesting choice because youâre most effective weapons for bombarment will be missiles - but they are the most collateral inducing weapons as well.
Why would it be easier to hit something moving at 150km per hour than something stationary?
Atmo is a two edged sword, it could provide some âdefenseâ against certain weapons, but on the otherhand it also provides a medium for concussive damage, which tends to do more damage than the weapon itself, and is the principle behind fuel-air munitions for example.
And really, atmo does very little against lasers or KKWs we currently use fairly low powered lasers to determine the exact distance of the moon by shooting them from sea level, to the moonâs surface, and back again, with the only real degradation coming from the inverse square law, atmo distrotion/absorption is a rounding error.
Why would it be easier to hit something moving at 150km per hour than something stationary?
Because 150km per hour in just death zero comparing to 15 000 km per SECOND, which is practically a minimal velocity for a space missile in Aurora.
It is much better to not move at all then to move so slowly (for the opposing targetting system) and lose the cover/maskig because of it. I say you so from my practical combat expierience in addition to the numbers.
And really, atmo does very little against lasers
Within the narrow transparency range of wavelengths.
Out of this range Earth atmo would absorb 95 to 999% of laser beam energy.
In Aurora terms Earth atmo is transparent (barring cloudiness, fogs and dust) for L2-tech lasers, not so much for L1 and L3, while absorbing 95+% of the higher levels lasers. Moderate clouds (covering usually about 1/2 of the surface) is I think an equivalent of several 1000-s of tons of Aurora shield generators for optical lasers too.
Venusian atmo is just nearly impenetrable except of some specific hardly weaponizable ranges. Well, would be interesting to let it be penetrable with mesons and HPMW.
15000 km/s with a 1 metric ton missile would have 26.8 billion megatons of TNT worth of kinetic energy, entering the atmosphere would create hypervelocity plasma fireball and shockwave, and assuming the missile has been designed to survive such entry, it would do more damage than the âdinosaur killerâ which hit/created the Yucatan Peninsula.
At which point it doesnât matter if one has concealment, or really, even cover. And what about a target moving Mach 2, Mach 10, Mach 100 is that harder to hit in that case?
Overall OTS weapons are already overly nerfed for âreal physicâ considerations. Cause even a 1kg missile at that speed is 26.8 kilotons of TNT, or two Hiroshimaâs.
Having Air units be a vehicle only capability and then having them limited by the regular vehicle rules is all that is needed. They donât need to be harder or easier to hit, damage, or kill. Want to make them only good in a singular role, then have the capability reduce max fortification to 0 and give a like change to hit modifier to offset.