Thread: Airships

I noticed that there are no topics relating especially to airships and with the aeroplane thread a while ago I thought I'd jump on the wagon* .

Airship balancing:

1. How to balance airships with aircraft?

The planes are much faster but would presumbably eat through fuel faster (assuming its implimemted) it would be hard to defend against them in a slow moving airship.

One way around this would be to give Green Storm Airships a couple of gunner postitions to deal with Air to air combat BUT this lessens the number of troops we have on the ground and with every airship eating up three people just to use it effectively...

What are your ideas on balancing air combat?

Airships are heavily armoured in comparison to aeroplanes. So it would take several rockets (and aeroplanes carry only 2 normally - so the rest has to be done with MGs) to take one down. Aeroplanes would be taken down with just one rocket... but lining up a aeroplane in an airships sights would be much harder because they are slower to respond.

The combat airships in Traction Wars have huge engines for their size. The Fox Spirit has two 1,233 HP engines on it. This in mind the attackships are much faster than your average airship - they're still slower than aeroplanes though. They also have natural advantages in being able to land vertically so they can refuel and rearm faster.

The larger and slower airships such as warships and shuttles will have short ranged weapons to deal with any aeroplanes which try and bother them. On the capital ships these may be AI controlled so the number of players per ship is lessened on the shuttles they will defiantly be player controlled as there will be spare players onboard anyway during transit.

This is mostly theory currently. Once we have more aerial units ingame we'll be able to balence them better against one another. One option is to give combat airships rocket pods which can be aimed slightly - this would give them a better chance at hitting aeroplanes while still maintaining the correct flying charactistics of an airship.

That sounds good, it might be possible to have AI controlled guns that the player could override if he wanted to carry more passengers or do something the AI wouldn't (like shooting at a building).

Airships might also fly higher then Airplanes? In WWII the Germans built high-fliers which flew higher then both the bullets and aircraft at the time. To balance things though the airships are larger targets and slower, so they'd be vunerable during landing and takeoff.

That's not a bad idea, I'm pretty sure we can set individual ceilings for aircraft. There is of course the problem with that of players sitting out of reach the whole game. Perhaps we should make it so only combat airships can go that high. Normal airships have to stay within reach of aeroplanes but can still evade flak.

The AI guns would be basically machine guns or flak. The ships with them would have much larger guns which the player could control. I haven't finished working out how to balance the capital ships into the game, they're slow and heavily armoured but they can pack a serious punch in fire-power. Nothing on the ground would survive - which is where the problem arises....

Bah! Who cares about the ground pounders anyway* ;D?
They could always cower in buildings until the enormous death-dealing ship passes.

Airships would run out of fuel eventually and have to come down (you could make them hybrids so they derive lift from a combination of thrust and gas).

I agree that transports and airships which are important to objectives should stay in range, and the combat ships will have to come down to attack anyway.

You could always have the capital classes carry very little ammo and have to re-arm frequently, or be followed by ammo-ships (not sure this would be practical, but it would provide a weak link in an otherwise indestructable airship).

Another option would be to have the airships guns difficult to aim at targets on the ground due to elevation unless at an extreme distance (they are designed to destroy citys after all)... that would give the troops on the ground a chance since the ship would probably miss, it'd also encourage pilots to save ammo for important targets (like tanks).

Already done that with the aiming of the turrets. Hiding in buildings isn't an option as the building would just be flattened.

Our airships would come down even though they aren't hybrids. The variable weight wouldn't work without the power from the engines so we could justify them coming down quiet fast once they run out of fuel.

Capital ships however don't have variable weight so they wouldn't come down. We could just knock their engines out though. They'd be one hell of a sitting duck!

Agreed, but thats no good really if they're hovering out of range.....

Would it be possible to un-armour the tops of them? That would give anyone who got above them a good chance to bring it down.

Although the capital classes would probably only be included in missions where the Tractionists had forces to counter them, prehaps an anti-aircraft vehicle of some sort?

Or another Capital ship? I was considering the idea that the Tractionists would have probably come up with at least an Air Destroyer by the end of the war.

Heavy Anti-Air would be possible, a beefed up 88mm is the sort of thing I image could do them a lot of damage.

Perhaps we could weaken the armour on the top, but we don't want them too vulnerable.

That'd work (grudginly hands over capital ship to tractionists).
Capital Ships would probably only be deployed in difficult situations anyway, so the enemy would likely have something to counter it with.

I thought that making the top weaker would provide a small opening without making them too vunerable, it would still be practically impossible to destroy from the ground without proper weapons but if the pilot dived too quickly it'd give the man with the RPG (or equivilant) a chance.

Well a Destroyer isn't really a Capital ship. The Green Storm would still have Cruisers and Dreadnoughts

I was also forgetting Aerial-Torpedoes which Destroyers and some modified airships carry. A couple of those and a capital ship would be crippled if not dead.

I think it's going to come down to capital ships have to be dealt with by other air units in most cases. Occasionally there might be a scenario where the Tractionists have heavy AA in position waiting but that would only be on cities and heavily defended areas.