Close Air Support

Now before I get started, I’d like to point out that this is just a general idea to be built upon.

Over the years I’ve noticed that there is a lack of point to the skills of Fly and Drive, simply because there is a lack of anything to use them for besides moving a ship around engineering garages. There has been several times in my experience that when engaged in ground warfare, I’ve always thought it would be useful to call on a fighter/freighter for ariel help. Naval support as generally known involves one person in orbit tractoring ships and rarely bombarding the planet.

Some of you know that I’m a soldier in the big bad real world, and for me when doing my job it is always a comforting thought to know that if the proverbial shit starts to hit the fan, there’s always CAS hovering within a couple of minutes.

So my suggestion would be to branch out the ‘Fly’ capabilities of ships to be able to engage ground targets at will, and or possibly in a skill linked to a man on the ground ‘painting’ targets for the support craft for a more accurate strike.

It wouldn’t be overpowered if only clans had access to that, like an empower skill. I think Walldo has been trying for -years- to get functioning speeders, and ship-to-ground support. It would be a little overpowering, but not that much. So long as it’s balanced right.

This would go in function about the same time as the AT series walkers and speeders.. now if there was a system of combat that would fit with land based ship/walker combat that would be awesome but that’s probably still a long way off even if it is in the works.

In the grand scheme of things, pilot mains are powerful enough in clan warfare as it is–you can win a war without grunts, but you can’t win it without pilots.
Giving pilots the ability to fly starfighters on the ground and rickroll combat mains is about as unbalancing as it gets.

Yeah, but that’s exactly how war works. Bombers are suposed to be the ones to fly down and blow people to tiny bits. Then again, that’s assuming there’s like 20-100 people battalions marching to the main clan base. So, yeah, it would be a little overpowered.

The only way this would work is, I think, if you had a 2D map of rooms for battles with vehicles/troops, and that combatants wouldn’t actually fight in these battles for planets’ control points (there’d be 3, one in each corner for each groups’ ‘Main Base’ or ‘insertion point’ onto the battlefield, and 1-2 in the middle). The combatant would be a commander, and I guess they could adapt the Battlegroup system to this somehow for the vehicles, and then squadron for the troops.

Isn’t the hover mode still broken, too?

Where any ship that tries to hover gets deleted?

Yes, as far as I know.

Well, to tone down the cheapness, there could be something implemented, like the hatch on a flying ship can’t close. sounds gay, I know, but at the same time, it would allow people to throw nades into the ship, and if timed right, it could kill the pilot. I like the suggested bombard idea, where target x has a beacon so ship A can fire at there general location.

The problem I see with speeders is that ships being able to fly makes speeds absolutely useless. If ships could hover in place only, and transfer to a different pad, it would be ok, but otherwise, speeders are useless.

Also, if it was reduced to speeders, and they could take damage from a grenade on the ground that blows, or something else, it would probably work well.

lets say I take out a repeater, kill the speeder, you have a 5 second warning to jump off, if you don’t jump off, you get killed like if your ship had just crash landed.

simplest way to do it is probably making speeders their own class of ships, make it so speeders can get damaged from normal weaponry, and give them no shields.(makes them desirable for combatants and pilots this way, since any combatant can come in, fire off a shot, and if the thing explodes, then it could change the flow of the battle.)

As for stikes, why not have the call command have an extension, like ‘call strike team’ and it calls it to the room you are in when you do the call. And lets say, it’s like calling a drone with a grenade, and when it gets to the room, it gives a message of the missiles dropping, and if you are in the exact room 3 seconds later, you get killed.

The only good idea here, in my opinion, is the beacon one. And even that is a little bit overpowered. They’d have to take a long time to set up and dissappear reasonably soon, rather than being near instant and lasting forever and being unfindable unless you have the skill. Otherwise one break-in and every single room in a clanbase would be prepared for destruction.

It sounds to me like a lot of people are looking at these suggestions, and assuming an automatic hit rate with instant fire every time. My suggestion? What if you take any one of half a dozen of those abilities…Then add rocket launchers for combatants to take down those fighters…With possible homing upgrades, to home in on, and accurately pop the hovering bombers…Then, you take the bombers themselves, and make them Inaccurate, and only reloadable in orbit…Fighters can’t exactly carry fifty million bombs on here ya know. BAM. Suddenly it goes from overpowered, to relatively interesting.

But it all seems a moot point anyways. What, with structures being how they are.