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Air maneuver


Loki

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I would love to see more air maneuver for your aircrafts like

  • Force to land
  • Go for destruction
  • Target the engines

Also there would be a quick status-check for all your aircraft useful. If you click on the intercept button you have to choose the destination before you can see all the aircraft and their fuel and health status. I would prefer to see the list before choosing a destination because sometimes I just want to see if my aircraft are fully refueled.

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I would love to see more air maneuver for your aircrafts like
  • Force to land

  • Go for destruction

  • Target the engines

Also there would be a quick status-check for all your aircraft useful. If you click on the intercept button you have to choose the destination before you can see all the aircraft and their fuel and health status. I would prefer to see the list before choosing a destination because sometimes I just want to see if my aircraft are fully refueled.

I can't see any of those being realistic options. Modern missiles and guns just don't allow for targetting certain parts or "tempered" destruction. All heat seekers will go for the hottest part of the target and I don't know of any missile or gun that can be precisely aimed for a certain part of a target even now (never mind in the 70's). If the target was very large the guns on an F-17 could possibly be aimed at a certain area, but when your going 450+ mph and engaged in violent manuevers odds are that ANY hit will be the best you can hope for.

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this has gave me one idea - commence suicide run or in other words ram the target. There's very few things more dramatic and violent. I think this would be simply an amazing idea especially for the environment this game is going for.

Of course if you meant by the same thing with "Go for destruction" then I 100% agree on that :)

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this has gave me one idea - commence suicide run or in other words ram the target. There's very few things more dramatic and violent. I think this would be simply an amazing idea especially for the environment this game is going for.

Of course if you meant by the same thing with "Go for destruction" then I 100% agree on that :)

Wouldn't that be something against the larger ships! Kamikaze runs to save humanity! Good idea.

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Wouldn't it be pointless unless the ship can turn upside down and then open the doors for a big energy blast type weapon that they are about to fire?

But if that was allowed I bet everyone would expect the computer virus upload to the mothership to disable all the smaller crafts green energy shields.

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While the idea of an increased set of manoeuvres isn’t a bad one, there are a few questions that I would raise.

1) Where in the UI would these go? At the moment there’s just enough room for the three standard manoeuvres. If you wanted more, then where would you put them?

2) How would 3-dimensional manoeuvres translate onto a 2-dimensional playing field?

3) What about manoeuvres for the aliens?

4) If the end effect of a manoeuvre is the same then why bother having it? E.G. if shooting out engines or shooting at the hull results in a crash-landing, then what difference is there?

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You could decrease the UI buttons in their size for starters. I think an Immelman or self-destruct run aren't that big a problem to implememnt in 2D simply because one doesn't need any 3D implementation and the other (the Immelman obviously) can be expressed as a reverse of the plain's vector (this would be extremely easy to implement in the current airfighting UI system that appears to be vector based anyway)

Manuvers for the aliens could definatley be added (again 1-2 nothing to fancy that demands extensive worK).

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First of all, we shouldn't discuss the possibilities in reality because after all it's a game with UFOs. So even if it's not possible for real missiles to hit explicit part of an enemy spaceship it could be researched and implemented.

My intend for the maneuvers: It would be nice to have a choice not to have another tactical mission after the last 10 in just a few ingame minutes or so. There was a discussion about auto-resolving the tactical missions but I prefer to just shoot them to hell instead of just letting the CPU handle my soldiers. But with the maneuvers there would still be the chance that my pilots are not good enough and let the damn UFO crash-land.

About the "hit the engines" maneuver: It would make it more difficult for the UFOs to maneuver during flight combat and you could tail the UFO with the bord-cannon and shoot the hell out of it. So the damaged engines would slow the UFO down and make the turn radius higher.

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StellarRat don't you already have a thrust (speed) control for that? Or do you want the airplane to hover?

(and a pause button to help you control more then 1 plane at the same time)

I want the plane to close to max. missile range and maintain that range unless otherwise ordered to do something else. Of course, this all supposes the plane is fast enough to keep it's distance, if it can't at least it should try.
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From the front or from the back? I'm having a hard time imagining that they could keep the distance if the enemy is heading towards the plane.

There are up to 3 planes in air-combat. One strategy is to let the UFO tail one of the aircrafts and shoot with the other two.

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I know. but I assumed there had to be something more to it as the throttle control wasnt enough for some reason.

(Besides is that tactic something that the devs want to remain in the game? I thought it as going to get patched as the AI got better?)

Edited by Gorlom
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From the front or from the back? I'm having a hard time imagining that they could keep the distance if the enemy is heading towards the plane.
That's the trick isn't it? The computer is much better at doing some things than human pushing buttons specially if you have multiple planes to control and aliens to watch. The button/command I had in mind would be smart enough to guide the plane around the target at max. weapon range by flying an arc and controlling the throttle for you. Even during a head on engagement it's possible to turn hard and try to swing around on one side or the other. If you were to try this only using throttle the alien would just run over you eventually or you'd have to do a 180 and just run like crazy (denying yourself any change to fire.) Does that make any sense?
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No, I'm still not following you.. Can you perform what this command would do manually or would it bend the rules of certain mechanics?

Do you at any time pause the aircombat to issue orders? The first impression I get is that you want a "handholding" mechanic because you aren't used to pausing the battle. I apologize for the dirty word but to my limited understanding of the problem it seems like you want to have the game play for you when you already have all the tools to do just that yourself??

Edited by Gorlom
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No, I'm still not following you.. Can you perform what this command would do manually or would it bend the rules of certain mechanics?

Do you at any time pause the aircombat to issue orders? The first impression I get is that you want a "handholding" mechanic because you aren't used to pausing the battle. I apologize for the dirty word but to my limited understanding of the problem it seems like you want to have the game play for you when you already have all the tools to do just that yourself??

I don't want to spend all day making course changes and throttle changes, pausing, and correcting and pausing. The pilots would do this naturally. A pilot is always going to employ his weapons with the least risk to himself unless ordered otherwise i.e. make the best possible intercept then clear out. I guess I'm asking for some automation of intercepts to speed things up. Do you get it now?
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