Rivers and river combat

[FastAndFree]

Originally Posted by Mechzz

Vanu technology allows our vehicles to float on water. Some of the common pool vehicles were also given the ability to float I think, so there has been limited water-based combat for some time.

This is where the problems start though, which common pool vehicle would that be? Surely not the Sunderer that weighs several times more than a tank... And there is nothing else that could plausibly replace the Deliverers, leaving us with the only "navy"

[Sledgecrushr]

Really you would just have to consider rivers and seas as a valuable land resource. If these bodies hold some value then people will fight over them.

[kaffis]

My idea of river combat is lobbing tank shells from one side to the other in support of bridge battles.

Anything beyond that is probably not necessary, because I can't see a compelling way to make nautical vessels advantageous over doing this. Tanks are already pretty quick, and if you need to go faster, you'll use air vehicles. Neither of these are restricted to the water, so why invest (resources and certs) in a water vehicle?

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by noxious

The harm would be in diverting resources from more meaningful additions. Realistically, boats in rivers just won't be used for anything but transport. They're not very useful in real combat. They're not very useful in video game combat. There are much more important things that can be added to the game.

There are pretty much two form letter responses against adding anything that's different:
1. It's overpowered, we don't need BFR equivalents
2. It's a waste of dev resources

Who says it will only be used for transport? And even if so, that could be useful in and of itself. I say add them for transport purposes alone. Nevertheless, make them powerful enough, design the continent so that they present an advantage to repulsing river crossings, they will get used.

The only viable argument here is that they might only be able to be used on such continents as actually have rivers and that for that reason it may be a waste, however, I don't really think we have an "order of battle", so to speak, on what dev resources are available. What if the vehicle team has room in its schedule to work on this? What if they've already been working on boats/ships to test the idea of naval combat, and a river gunboat simply means a smaller one, or maybe even they already have an appropriate boat model and making it a river gunboat simply means slapping on the appropriate guns? The same exact size and model of a river gunboat could be used as a light escort for larger ships in the event there's ever full naval combat.

People say making custom maps is a very time consuming and tedious and expensive. If they've already got a continent planned that's got a lot of rivers, they might as well make the best of it.

[ItsTheSheppy]

In order for naval combat to have any meaning, people would want to control the waters. The problem is, I imagine bridges will not be destructible, and it's not like troops are supplies need to be ferried across water, so there is no tactical advantage of controlling water.

Also, if you really wanna pilot vehicles over rivers and be a riverman, hop in a magrider. You don't even need to get wet.

[laelgon]

While I think the use of boats would be cool, I can't really see them being useful in a game where anyone can hop into an aircraft pretty much at will. A galaxy can bring an entire squad to anywhere on the continent, while a boat would be severely limited. Now if there was a map that was pretty much just small islands with bases and the rest was open water, I could see boats actually being useful.

[Masahiko]

I dont think river combat would be as interesting as a more open Archipelago set up. Where transports and boats were more necessary for creating beach heads While rivers do play a big part what happens after the river? I dont think well find people just sitting in the boats waiting for a fight to happen that may never come.

A naval battle is going to take more thought, mostly because its a particular setup that is going to be against the usual game play (which is mostly on dry land). What does infantry do while they are crossing the water? What do naval captains do on land? What kind of ships will we have in the navy? Does an aircraft carrier spawn planes? How many people would you need to run one of these ships? Are there subs, if so do we need sonar and Depth charges? Do we need to attack torpedo/depth charges to Air Cav?

[noxious]

Originally Posted by Stardouser

There are pretty much two form letter responses against adding anything that's different:
1. It's overpowered, we don't need BFR equivalents
2. It's a waste of dev resources

Who says it will only be used for transport? And even if so, that could be useful in and of itself. I say add them for transport purposes alone. Nevertheless, make them powerful enough, design the continent so that they present an advantage to repulsing river crossings, they will get used.

Alas, in the real world, the latter of your form letter responses governs every decision we make, time and money being the finite resources that they are. It's obvious that the idea is important to you, but any rational, objective analysis will ultimately arrive at the resource argument. There are few compelling reasons to add river-based watercraft (coolness factor aside) and when the idea must compete against every other idea for development, it's just not likely to come out a winner.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by noxious

Alas, in the real world, the latter of your form letter responses governs every decision we make, time and money being the finite resources that they are. It's obvious that the idea is important to you, but any rational, objective analysis will ultimately arrive at the resource argument. There are few compelling reasons to add river-based watercraft (coolness factor aside) and when the idea must compete against every other idea for development, it's just not likely to come out a winner.

OK, what is an example of a rational, objective analysis that will take us to the resource argument and not only take us there, but show that the projected usage of the riverboats would be insufficient to justify the resource expenditure to design them?

For example, can you cite an example of another MMOFPS that had such a thing and no one used it enough to justify that viewpoint?

I can go ahead and tell you about World War 2 Online, they have riverboats(although they also, quite efficiently, double as light patrol boats for ocean combat) and they aren't very fun to use. But I already know why they aren't fun to use, and that's because WW2OL is a huge, 1/2 scale model of Europe supercontinent and the chances of you encountering people at rivers was so low as to not be fun.

Is there another MMOFPS out there with river boats, that doesn't have the "never see anyone to fight because the game world is too large" problem, and yet nevertheless, no one used them?

Another way to ensure that these get used is to, on the continent that has rivers, give all empires access to the waterways, perhaps even letting them spawn their riverboats at the footholds. I'd personally rather have the bases be capturable(even if they are deep behind the lines and thus hard to capture) but if giving all factions unimpeded access is what it takes to make them get used, so be it.

There's also another possibility. They've probably already planned to make boat models for testing purposes of water combat. A pre-allocated resource expenditure, in other words. If, as a completely separate resource expenditure, they make a river dominated, or perhaps even archipelago continent, where is the resource waste in just making one of those boat models available to use on that continent? It's possible, therefore, that both of these things are already in process, in which case this thread serves to make the devs think "hey, we already did this part, and we already did this part, why don't we just combine the two?"

[Lonehunter]

A good place to make river combat more important is Hossin, our swampy home. What if the trees where so thick the only place to drive a ground vech easily is roads? Then all the sudden those waterways become another route to an outpost.

Damn I miss the Deliverer all ready

[Dir]

Originally Posted by Stardouser

2. It's a waste of dev resources

You have to admit whenever someone says this you can actually feel your amygdala swell and pulsate followed shortly by a loss of will to communicate.

[noxious]

I cannot cite another MMOFPS with boats where said boats were under-utilized because the genre is a blip on the radar in which few titles exist.

We can instead look at both the real world and at all video games (we base the latter at least loosely on the former), regardless of genre. In either case, river boats have never played an interesting role in combat, because they are plagued by a number of problems that prevent them from being viable.

The crux of the problem is that their movement is confined to a predetermined track; you can go only where the river goes. In a boat, you're stuck in the water. If the engagement moves away from the water, your boat becomes useless.

As a consequence of problem described in the last paragraph, you're almost always the hunted, and seldom the hunter. The enemy, both in the air and on the ground, can engage a river craft selectively. Engagements will always be on the terms of the guys in the air and on land because if they don't want to engage boat, they can simply move away from the river. This makes them undesirable in most combat situations and it makes for a frustrating experience for the guy in the boat who will die whenever the enemy gains the upper hand, but only sometimes get a kill when he gets the upper hand.

The only setting in which the aforementioned problems could be overlooked would be in a setting where water is featured at least as prominently as land, if not more so. I am skeptical that we'll ever see such a setting, but if we do, then sure, there would exist a practical reason to develop boats.

Most combat-based video games eschew boats because they just aren't terribly useful in combat. When they are added to such a game, they're relegated to transport duty, which is the same, limited role they perform in the real world.

[LordReaver]

Too many of you are thinking in terms of real life and PS1. PS2 is neither.

The only gameplay difference between water vehicles and ground vehicles is terrain. Water is just like land, but a flat plane. If a map is designed with emphasis on waterways and lakes, people will use water based vehicles. The question is, is it worth having two similar surfaces to fight upon? Each continent is supposed to be hand crafted to emphasize different kinds of combat. Indar seems to be balanced, Esamir will probably be for tanks, Amerish infantry, and Searhus air. I think those are the conts they are adding anyways. The point is, a cont with emphasis on water combat could be crafted. Even if that cont was the only one that supported water combat, it would make that cont feel very different from the other ones, and thus more fun.

The argument of "if you can't drive, you will fly" doesn't hold up. Why would you drive if you could fly in the first place? The answer is "AA". The more aircraft there are, the more AA there is. Just think about when it happens in PS1, and how it creates no fly zones.

"It's a waste of development time" Not if it's going to add gameplay value....

"People don't want water combat" ..........It's one of the most asked for features. It's right up there with space combat. I don't know how anybody could even try to pretend that it's not wanted. Just because you have a biased view on how it would work, doesn't negate other peoples wishes.

[Soothsayer]

If an engy can deploy a mannable turret with their ace, they should be able to deploy a zodiac from the shore of a river/lake for infantry to gain new approaches for water attack.

I don't see much point in developing a vehicle that is more permanent for than that for use in naval combat aside from something similar to the deliverer (would be what I would want in for the next wave of vehicles that get developed after launch).

I agree with others, there would have to be a real point to generating conflict over water areas.

[Stardouser]

Then the game devs need to make a real point to conflict over water areas. Period.

Thing is, people think that doing that is going to take away precious resources from something else. Why don't we just toss out every idea for that reason?