Hmm, space combat?

[SpaceDrake]

Originally posted by thebigbaddude2k in the Sony PS forums
You know about the navy that you guys have been thinking about? Well I say screw water combat! I want space combat! Big battleships and fighters and stuff!

To which my reply was:

Well now, IIRC the HARTs go into low orbit to drop their pods, correct?
Perhaps space combat could slowly become an extension of the desire of all sides to shoot down HARTs before they drop their pods... but don't want to bother with the gauntlet of air defenses that protect the things when they are launching from their bases.

You'd start off with what would essentially be modified Mosquitos that can operate in a vaccum. The HARTs would probably be armed (heck, the occupants could man the guns!) and then bigger ships would slowly be developed, until an entire second side of the game was developed around space combat, especially big capships that can lend orbital bombardments to ground assaults (since the capture of Auraxis is still the primary goal of all parties involved.)

This is PlanetSide, however, and any such "expansion" would be a loooooooooooong ways down the road... I'm thinking that the basic "Vaccum-capable Skeeters" would show up a year and a half from release, and the biggest of the capships (carriers and dreadnoughts, likely) would show up three years after initial release at least. This would make sense in both development terms and story-wise: it'd give the dev team plenty of time to work out any issues involved with such an expansion, and it'd allow story-wise for the construction of the necessary infrastructure to support such things. (Hell, the construction yards for the bigger capships will probably need to be off-world. It'd be hard just getting those things off the ground.

There would be several concerns in technology, though. First off, the way the game is constructed now, each continent is a "zone". There is no single planet map in actuality, which cuts waaaaaay back on latency and rendering issues. If you go into orbit (and can concievably come down at will) then unless you do some kind of cheap fixed sprite thing you'd need to show the whole planet at a time. That can be done with today's technology, but you'd been at least a P4 and GeForce 3 or equivalent setup to render that at anything approaching a playable framerate.

The second issue is related to the first - zoning. The game architecture would have to be remodeled into a single massive farking zone. The Devs are doing naval combat already, though, so I assume they've got this worked out. (Frankly, in a year or so a niftily designed load balancing netcode combined with the uber 64-bit base hardware coming out this year would be capable of handling such strain.)

My blood boils at the mere thought of all this - it'd have to be a long way off, but god-damn, it's an exciting idea. Here's to hoping they do it.

What do you guys think?

[Arthell]

The ships for aerial bombardment would conflict with the no mass destruction weapons idea the devs are with right now.

Would have to agree, too, since running around with a large squad then suddenly being blown to pieces without any chance to do anything wouldnt be the best way to die. :p

The ideas nice, but you would need to add some more flavor for high-altitude since just being skeeters to shoot down drop pods wouldnt be that appealing for people. Doubt PS would make it into space combat, though.

[SpaceDrake]

Originally posted by Arthell
The ships for aerial bombardment would conflict with the no mass destruction weapons idea the devs are with right now.

Would have to agree, too, since running around with a large squad then suddenly being blown to pieces without any chance to do anything wouldnt be the best way to die. :p

I can sort of see that... but remember, such fire would be rather inaccurate. And any ship capable of mass bombardment is years away - by then we'd also have ground guns near bases capable of going into orbit. In other words, orbital bombardment would be useful mostly in base assaults, and it wouldn't be overly destructive. Standing still to spam a random area of some continent would probably get your fleet mulched. Some guys might die, but they'd be vindicated in the knowledge that their Navy mates now know where the enemy is located.

The ideas nice, but you would need to add some more flavor for high-altitude since just being skeeters to shoot down drop pods wouldnt be that appealing for people. Doubt PS would make it into space combat, though.

Well, it'd start out with modified Skeeters and Reavers, since that'd be all the empires have available. After a while they would of course come up with more specialized designs, ranging from non-atmospheric fighters to corvettes to small and then large cap-ships. I think it'd add a nice layer of depth to the game - but only way, way down the road, as I said earlier.

[Jaged]

Idea sounds great, but unlikely.

[Ludio]

If the primary purpose of the orbital combat was to attack other ships/bases and take them over with infantry then it could be cool. If the primary purpose was to bombard the ground and other ships then it wouldn't work so well.

[DiosT]

Space combat = ok

air combat = bah



You're talkin about having space combat vehicles in air-->gound fights, no way i ever wanna see that, even 'inaccurate' fire...


Would be nice to see battleships in SPACE which dont fire to the surface, but, not space ships killing squads/bases from space/air... just adds in too many balancing problems

[Hamma]

I tend to agree with diost here, that is bad news. It is in essense a super weapon, it requires no real skill to use, and can hit anywhere on the map?!

[Ludio]

Thats why I think it could happen, but only if it didn't have the bombardment. If the ships mainly acted as big bases in the sky then it could be cool. You could also give them some other purpose, but the main one would be cool bases that orbited Auraxis. This would be sort of like the bases that Duritz was thinking of, but in space.

[Daleon]

I tend to agree with everyone. You defintely don't ever want to completely take away a players ability to determine his own fate. So there has to be a chance to defend against an attack and a chance to win against any attack.

I don't really see space as PS's next step either. Its been done, and being done in SWG and other games.

So lets open some discussion on possible future expansions for the game. Maybe someone will come up with a good idea that may work.

Some ideas -
Another race, maybe invaders from space or soemthing like Rise of the Machines? :) We all get wiped out by terminators.

Underground combat - The TR have control of the surface while a deadly war wages between the Vanu and NC for control of the inner world.

I don't think another planet would ever really be necessary, but maybe a Moon base ala Lucilin.

Some things I would really love to see in the future that are not necessarily expansions:

1. More history developed. Yes its mostly FPS and action, but one of the things I enjoyed the most about Tribes was the Starsiege history. If you didn't read it you missed out on some cool stories.

2. A dynamic world, as much as possible. I don't think PS can ever reach where Shadowbane is going since it wasn't designed from the begining like this. But if any ability to add/destroy bases, etc by players would be huge.

3. Players will more than likely drive most of the game and the wars between the three factions. But don't let it end up like DaoC, where RvR is the same today as it was when the game first started. Fighting the same battle everyday for two years... gets old to say the least.

My last bit of advice to dev's, don't be afraid to do what you want to do. So many games are failures these days b/c dev's give up on their vision to cater to the masses.

[Kyonye]

Originally posted by Hamma
I tend to agree with diost here, that is bad news. It is in essense a super weapon, it requires no real skill to use, and can hit anywhere on the map?!

I to agree with you and diost. space-space combat seems ok(but unlikely), but space-ground would tend to be a little unfair. being able to take out an entire squad with one shot would be unbalanced.

[SpaceDrake]

Hrmmmm... *grumble* I suppose you guys are right about capital ships and orbital bombardments. I still think that all it would mean is coordinating the groundpounders with the Navy, which would add another level of depth to the game. We'll see.

And of course, I'm just bunging around ideas here. In some ways, cap-ships might not even make a lot of sense - those take huge amounts of manpower and resources to operate correctly. Exo-atmospheric combat wouldn't necessarily have to go beyond the "modified Skeeters and Reavers to shoot down HARTs" phase - that alone would be a welcome addition, since it'd mean that all sides could intercept drop pods before they get to their destination. (And then, of course, the side with the HART would hopefully send an escort with it... it'd be another option for pilots, and that's a Good Thing�.)

Underground combat would be the rawk as well - though I'm not sure how you'd go about making tunnels and whatnot.

As for a dynamic world and Shadowbane: heh. SB dynamic. Right. :p I understand your message, though, and to some extent I think we will see that. I'm sure the devs will adapt each server's "storyline" depending on who starts winning on each server. We'll just have to see.

And YES to more history/fiction! Heck, some of us are going to be adding fiction anyway.

[Lexington_Steele]

Originally posted by Hamma
I tend to agree with diost here, that is bad news. It is in essense a super weapon, it requires no real skill to use, and can hit anywhere on the map?!

We got death star?

[BLuE_ZeRO]

I'd like to see a little space combat but what I want to see is some actual control over your planet reentry. I don't like this HART system where you just click some place and it basically takes you there. Being able to actually fly a ship down to the planet would be something I'd like to see personally. If that ship happened to have laser cannons or something and it could attack other ships that were going down at the same time so be it :D

[SandTrout]

Maybe it could be set up that the ships allow you to drop-pod down onto certain continents at certain times because of their orbit. Every continent would be available to drop on every continent, but only durring a window of opertunity. The more ships you have, the more often you have a window of opertunity to drop on a continent. There would be sanctuary ships of course that cant be taken so that no empire has no posiblity of breaking continent lock.

You could use the modified mosquitoes and Reavers to atack the ships and disable defences, but not destroy the ship itself. The ship is more like an orbital base that provides drop-pod ability. In order to take control of a ship, you have to use a boarding transport and hack some # of consoles(not just 1, we dont want these things switching sides like bases, and unlike most of the bases, they were made after the war started) while dealing with defenders.

A major questions is if there will be low/no gravity on these ships. This new aspect could add a major difference between soldiers fighting in space or on the ground. If you are good at 1, you may not be good at the other.

Another bonus is you don't have to worry about mosquito-eating lakes.

[Mikedanad]

This sprouted me a cool new idea...galaxies being able to somehow connect in mid air to transfer infantry troop from one ship to another....whoa....

[SandTrout]

That wouldn't be all that usefull realy, and too much codeing to be worth it.

The boarding party would be useful because you dont have to compensate for gravity and you can have an air-lock so people can get off without spawning directly into enemy line of fire.

[Hamma]

I should clear up that I think space combat would be cool ;) it would be a whole new aspect to the game however, probably wont happen till a very large expansion.

But space attacking the ground = bad

[Arshune]

Speaking of space, whatever happened to those orbital platforms? They'd be a neat place for all those ideas people have been having about air combat and air bases to center on, only in space. Could have little jetpacks for people to fly from place to place with, or failing that, they could fall to a gruesome death if they don't watch their step.

I like the idea of capital ships, and for those of you saying that balancing them would be hard...stop and think about it for a minute. Making something shoot the ground from space would be damn near impossible for the devs to implement, so we'll assume that anything big couldn't do that...the big cannons they have, however, would fire shots that moved so slowly that the only things at risk from them would be a target that's too big and slow to simply angle its trajectory a little bit. If the orbital platforms are added, they could have such guns too and also a variety of destructable pieces and segments...I think that'd be really cool.

[Hamma]

Orbital platforms were removed because they felt they served no real purpose as I understand it.

That doesent mean they will be gone forever however :p

[Flameseeker]

Hamma, check your PM, I sent you one cuz I felt bad for that spam poll. :( Sorry. From now on,
:sniper: :spam:

[Arshune]

I personally think the orbital platforms would make more sense as a safe-haven then a continent would, it just seems like landing forces on the sanctuary wouldn't be hard if it wasn't prohibited by game systems, something in space away from common transport routes just seems more logical...so even if they had no real purpose in game other than being secure they'd at least seem more logical in the context of the setting what with the HART available and all...but maybe that's just me.