So, you know what's fun? Flying low and fast on a planetary surface.
So let's add gameplay via gunfire and explosions. Here's how you do it:
Add in new alien surface bases, from ones sized about the same as larger human bases, to ones that cover multiple square kilometers.
Make certain buildings in these bases destructable via explosive damage.
Give us missions to go and out take out these buildings.
Give these bases plenty two kinds of anti-air defenses, both at the base and at various sites extending up to dozen or more km out from it: "Light" ones that have a range of a km or so and don't do much damage (but can waste an SRV), unless we fly really slow and just take lots of hits. And "Heavy" ones that can obliterate an engineered medium combat ship with just a couple of shots.
The "heavy" guns would also have a very long range, say a radius of 20 kilometers, and would either be fast-firing extremely-fast moving projectiles, or fast moving and guided projectiles, or just be hitscan.
But the heavy guns wouldn't be able to depress fully flat, and their projectiles would need to move out a small distance to "arm".
So basically we have a situation where a pilot would want to approach from over 20 km out (a lot more for the bigger bases) fly in low and fast and use terrain features as cover - to minimize hits taken from the "light" guns and avoid going high enough to let the "heavy" guns get a shot off - and take out a target with missiles, torps, or a bombing run with mines; then stay low and fast to egress and get out.
It'd require some new assets and stuff to get in place, yeah.
But it'd be a blast to play.
It'd work on bigger scales too: Player groups wanting to investigate these alien bases up close would have to do things like organize saturated bombing missions to take out all the "light" guns so that SRV's could safely go in and explore.
So let's add gameplay via gunfire and explosions. Here's how you do it:
Add in new alien surface bases, from ones sized about the same as larger human bases, to ones that cover multiple square kilometers.
Make certain buildings in these bases destructable via explosive damage.
Give us missions to go and out take out these buildings.
Give these bases plenty two kinds of anti-air defenses, both at the base and at various sites extending up to dozen or more km out from it: "Light" ones that have a range of a km or so and don't do much damage (but can waste an SRV), unless we fly really slow and just take lots of hits. And "Heavy" ones that can obliterate an engineered medium combat ship with just a couple of shots.
The "heavy" guns would also have a very long range, say a radius of 20 kilometers, and would either be fast-firing extremely-fast moving projectiles, or fast moving and guided projectiles, or just be hitscan.
But the heavy guns wouldn't be able to depress fully flat, and their projectiles would need to move out a small distance to "arm".
So basically we have a situation where a pilot would want to approach from over 20 km out (a lot more for the bigger bases) fly in low and fast and use terrain features as cover - to minimize hits taken from the "light" guns and avoid going high enough to let the "heavy" guns get a shot off - and take out a target with missiles, torps, or a bombing run with mines; then stay low and fast to egress and get out.
It'd require some new assets and stuff to get in place, yeah.
But it'd be a blast to play.
It'd work on bigger scales too: Player groups wanting to investigate these alien bases up close would have to do things like organize saturated bombing missions to take out all the "light" guns so that SRV's could safely go in and explore.