Forged Alliance Forever

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-05-09T15:02:56+02:00

As I said, you already have that:

1) Select your air.
2) Issue a "Stop" command.
3) Wait ~1 second as the air units start spreading out.
4) Move the air where you would like it go.

Statistics: Posted by uberge3k — 09 May 2012, 15:02

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-05-09T13:48:10+02:00

i do that very often if i want to snipe something valuable. although 4flaks rape 50bombers if they come sticking close together.
i just want a command to get them to spread so i dont have to sort them by hand.

Statistics: Posted by Jace — 09 May 2012, 13:48

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-05-09T13:33:40+02:00

Don't touch air micro. That area of the game is already fine.

If you want to spread them out, give them a stop command, wait for them to go off a little ways, then continue moving. Also, never send any type of air over flak.

Statistics: Posted by uberge3k — 09 May 2012, 13:33

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-05-09T10:02:06+02:00

I think most of the players want them to form a ball instead of spreading, for micro sake.

Statistics: Posted by Ze_PilOt — 09 May 2012, 10:02

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-05-09T09:40:27+02:00

I like that idea, if it is possible to bring back formations for air-Units. I always hatet how they tend to stick together when you send them over a flak and you have to go for ninja-mode to get them spread out.

It would already be enough if it was possible to just give them a command so they dont form a solid cluster.

Statistics: Posted by Jace — 09 May 2012, 09:40

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-05-09T01:11:14+02:00

AdmiralZeech wrote:
Although I havent investigated the problem in detail, I think the main reason why carpet bombing was removed originally was to implement physics-based bomb trajectories. This required the bomber to figure out what it could attack in front of it, which presumably was a little too hard in the current engine.

Personally, I think physics-based bomb trajectories are overrated and pointless. Did FAF fix the bug where bombers would consistently miss their targets sometimes?

Ideally I think bombers should be home-on-point like MMLs are. That's pretty much what the physics-based trajectory is "supposed" to be, only a little more reliable. IIRC home-on-point wasnt available vanilla supcom, so I had to make bombs fall straight down with a really low speed.

If I were going to do a carpet bombing mod for FA, I'd make the weapon range for bombers fairly small, and then set the bombs to home-on-point. Then fix up the multi-bombing bugs and balance the feature via the bomb reload speed & bomb damage.

---------------------

To me, it would be better if bombers were nerfed so that they aren't useful in bomber-first scenarios, and then given carpet bombing. Because carpet bombing is a mechanic that favours larger numbers of units, whereas currently multibombing bomber first favours small numbers of early units.

It would be cool to see T1 bombers that are viable because you can build 20 of them and devastate/damage a wide area, rather than being able to build 1 really quickly and kill engies/power in the early game. We don't actually have many weapons in SCFA that does large area damage, other than Cybran T3 arty, Salvation, and nukes.

It would also be cool to see stratbombers be good for things other than sniping.

Heh, and interesting to see what happens if the T4 Sera Experimental bomber gets this ability

This is a great idea and I'd love to see it properly implemented. Right now (granted I'm playing at a much lower skill level these days) bomber first can either result in a snowball victory from proper micro or not much loss if you don't micro it. It's almost a no brainer and people are even using it in the tournaments because it's so effective. I'd love to see mass bombers viable as well and I remember using/enjoying air formations when the game came out.

Statistics: Posted by Veta — 09 May 2012, 01:11

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-26T22:26:44+02:00

Although I havent investigated the problem in detail, I think the main reason why carpet bombing was removed originally was to implement physics-based bomb trajectories. This required the bomber to figure out what it could attack in front of it, which presumably was a little too hard in the current engine.

Personally, I think physics-based bomb trajectories are overrated and pointless. Did FAF fix the bug where bombers would consistently miss their targets sometimes?

Ideally I think bombers should be home-on-point like MMLs are. That's pretty much what the physics-based trajectory is "supposed" to be, only a little more reliable. IIRC home-on-point wasnt available vanilla supcom, so I had to make bombs fall straight down with a really low speed.

If I were going to do a carpet bombing mod for FA, I'd make the weapon range for bombers fairly small, and then set the bombs to home-on-point. Then fix up the multi-bombing bugs and balance the feature via the bomb reload speed & bomb damage.

---------------------

To me, it would be better if bombers were nerfed so that they aren't useful in bomber-first scenarios, and then given carpet bombing. Because carpet bombing is a mechanic that favours larger numbers of units, whereas currently multibombing bomber first favours small numbers of early units.

It would be cool to see T1 bombers that are viable because you can build 20 of them and devastate/damage a wide area, rather than being able to build 1 really quickly and kill engies/power in the early game. We don't actually have many weapons in SCFA that does large area damage, other than Cybran T3 arty, Salvation, and nukes.

It would also be cool to see stratbombers be good for things other than sniping.

Heh, and interesting to see what happens if the T4 Sera Experimental bomber gets this ability

Statistics: Posted by AdmiralZeech — 26 Apr 2012, 22:26

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-26T21:59:28+02:00

AdmiralZeech wrote:
I have named this feature "Carpet Bombing" and have been calling for its return for 5+ years
I wrote a mod for vanilla bringing the feature back. Never bothered to port it when FA came out though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng_-jkaRGZA

So yeah, join my Carpet Bombing fanclub hahaha.

FunkOff wrote:
I considered adding carpet bombing to FAF patch a long time ago... but I think it has too many balance implications to just be tossed into the game without proper testing.

I do remember that Admiral, very cool, and you posted back on the GPG net forums when I proposed a carpet bombing adjacency damage bonus: http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17189
I have to say that there certainly would be some balancing issues to consider if bombers could bomb in a continous stream as in your mod, but ofc it could be tweaked.
Formation bombing as it was in the stock game was balanced by the fact that bombers only dropped thier single normal bombload, it took a while to get them all into formation and on the way to thier target and also they were ofc more vulnerable to flack bunched up in a big group like that. The only thing that the patch changed is that they no longer automatically attacked when over an enemy in formation. I've no idea why they took that out, but if you could undo that code Funk, it would be a great way to combat the T1 engie spam you are so concerned with (that was its only real use anyway).

Statistics: Posted by Crayfish — 26 Apr 2012, 21:59

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-26T18:11:03+02:00

I considered adding carpet bombing to FAF patch a long time ago... but I think it has too many balance implications to just be tossed into the game without proper testing.

Statistics: Posted by FunkOff — 26 Apr 2012, 18:11

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-26T18:02:32+02:00

Crayfish wrote:
Btw, would it be possible to bring back air formation bombing? You used to be able to fly bombers in formation over targets and they would bomb 'in formation'. This got taken out in one of the patches, maybe 98 or 99 I dont remember, but this was a really cool feature that I had looked forward to since the announcement of formations before Vanilla's release. Unfortuantely it got removed just as bombers were made cheap enough to actually be worth building.
Anyone?

I have named this feature "Carpet Bombing" and have been calling for its return for 5+ years
I wrote a mod for vanilla bringing the feature back. Never bothered to port it when FA came out though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng_-jkaRGZA

So yeah, join my Carpet Bombing fanclub hahaha.

Statistics: Posted by AdmiralZeech — 26 Apr 2012, 18:02

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-25T22:31:14+02:00

Btw, would it be possible to bring back air formation bombing? You used to be able to fly bombers in formation over targets and they would bomb 'in formation'. This got taken out in one of the patches, maybe 98 or 99 I dont remember, but this was a really cool feature that I had looked forward to since the announcement of formations before Vanilla's release. Unfortuantely it got removed just as bombers were made cheap enough to actually be worth building.
Anyone?

Statistics: Posted by Crayfish — 25 Apr 2012, 22:31

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-25T16:09:46+02:00

The current pathfinding would be fine, if the units would not be stunned when they bump each other and if the delay between given move-command and executing move-command not extremly increase with the unit amount.

Statistics: Posted by Karottenrambo — 25 Apr 2012, 16:09

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-25T14:58:20+02:00

At the moment the only thing we can do is implement it in lua (which would be no small feat!). And lua is, well, slow. Throwing more threads at it is unlikely to make a big difference with this, as the threading we have access to is optimized for "making sure you don't hard lock your PC with a casual mod", rather than low level performance.

It's really something that we would need access to the engine to fix.

Statistics: Posted by uberge3k — 25 Apr 2012, 14:58

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-25T14:54:00+02:00

Jace wrote:
SC2 has much less units so you can go for more recource eating algorithms. And that flow field sure eats lots of recources.

Could those be spilt off onto other cores, or are they intrinsically part of the 'sim thread'?

Statistics: Posted by Crayfish — 25 Apr 2012, 14:54

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

2012-04-25T14:06:41+02:00

SC2 has much less units so you can go for more recource eating algorithms. And that flow field sure eats lots of recources.

Statistics: Posted by Jace — 25 Apr 2012, 14:06