By air vehicle you just mean the smuggler right? Like the warplane is useless atm till bombs. And the helicopter isn't great for trading. Better for going to places further away.

Ground vics are great if you get a good convoy goin so you can "depending on what mods you use (Rimwar works great for this)" wipe out and scavenge other trading caravans or war parties.

have you guys gotten much use out of planes? theyre good for short trips but i struggle with range getting any good use out of them. sucks you cant refuel them from fuel in your cargo bay.

Wait till pirates will be able to shoot your airplanes down and you will reconsider the meta :)

Originally posted by Oskar Potocki:

Wait till pirates will be able to shoot your airplanes down and you will reconsider the meta :)

that makes sense, sounds awesome!

That sounds quite interesting. Could you make it an entire event?

Alert aerial incident. You receive a message from one of your aircraft.

They were intercepted by mobile anti aircraft guns and critically damaged. The aircraft and any goods on board are lost but your colonists will try to parachute to safety (Assuming you equipped them with parachutes. That could be a consumable item.) You know the rough area of the crash site and you may be able to salvage your colonists and some of the supplies. The pirates that shot them down must also be in the area looking for them they can't hide for long.

You could mix in other systems and upgrades. By ordering the pilot to fly at a higher altitude would consume much more fuel but is any available if you equipping the aircraft with an oxygen tank

You could potentially escape an encounter if you equip the aircraft with active countermeasures.

You can avoid the encounter altogether if some aircraft have passive stealth capabilities.

If it's a multi crew aircraft assigning Gunners for a trading route could increase odds of surviving an attack from the air.

Just a few ideas.

I haven't been able to play this mod due to not having enough time yet (soon! I hope!) but I wonder if currently, or in future, there is/will be a requirement for planes to have a runway not only in your base but wherever they land as well?
It makes sense that a small plane like the smuggler would be able to land on fairly even terrain, or even on high-quality roads; but if there are to be larger more complex planes later, this doesn't seem reasonable. If it was then required / possible to construct airstrips/airbases on the world map and then only enable trade via planes if you had either built an airstrip in an adjacent tile, arranged some deal where you provide them resources to build one, or the settlement was advanced enough to have already built one themselves (i.e. imperial for sure but not tribal); this might make planes have a more specific niche to fill compared with other means of trade

Could take off and landing distances be reduced if landing on high quality surface? Or could takeoff and landing distance increased depending on weather? Volcanic ash, rain, snow would all reduce traction.

I have found planes useful for transporting goods between bases, but they are too fuel inefficient for peddling the vast amounts of blow I need sold. I have set up an airstrip with a mule truck between a great many friendly bases, and so I'll load a plane full of yayo, fly it over, offload it into the truck and have them drive it between bases, selling it, then load the silver and trade goods into the plane to fly back.

Originally posted by Oskar Potocki:

Wait till pirates will be able to shoot your airplanes down and you will reconsider the meta :)

Then we'll simply take a look at the current meta (the mess in Ukraine), and send aircraft only when our own air defenses dominate the local airspace.

Originally posted by Tam-Noose:

I haven't been able to play this mod due to not having enough time yet (soon! I hope!) but I wonder if currently, or in future, there is/will be a requirement for planes to have a runway not only in your base but wherever they land as well?
It makes sense that a small plane like the smuggler would be able to land on fairly even terrain, or even on high-quality roads; but if there are to be larger more complex planes later, this doesn't seem reasonable. If it was then required / possible to construct airstrips/airbases on the world map and then only enable trade via planes if you had either built an airstrip in an adjacent tile, arranged some deal where you provide them resources to build one, or the settlement was advanced enough to have already built one themselves (i.e. imperial for sure but not tribal); this might make planes have a more specific niche to fill compared with other means of trade

Maybe there will be airstrips included in base generation in the future? Might require RimCities to be updated as well. Or maybe when you're looting a pristine ruin (Real Ruins), you'll either use high-tech shuttles / dropships, lower-tech helicopters (all with VTOL capability), or send in the team via VTOL insertion / ground vehicles, they secure a landing zone, throw together an airstrip, then you send in the cargo planes to begin loading up the loot.

I think one potential way to limit the aircraft trade is to make the fuel consumption of planes go up significantly with mass while the land/water vehicles could just consume slightly more fuel with mass. I also think it could help to make the damage done to flying vehicles much worse than damage done to ground vehicles and make it so that vehicles can be repaired easier if they're smaller (severely limiting the effectiveness of large vehicles like airplanes or cargo planes). Additionally, we could nerf flying vehicles by creating a crash event where the pilot crashes the plane due to low skill, bad mood, or bad health, which would be far worse for flying vehicles than ground vehicles. Hope that helps in balancing this issue.

Originally posted by Oskar Potocki:

Wait till pirates will be able to shoot your airplanes down and you will reconsider the meta :)

Is there any plan to balance the mod in the mean time, or just wait an indeterminable amount of time for another mod to do something?

From my gameplay, I love playing on Mountainous areas, you can't use any aircraft in Mountainous terrain so that's one downside as well. Trading complete base security for shorter trade trips, I might prefer a truck to be honest.

Originally posted by Sethaa:

From my gameplay, I love playing on Mountainous areas, you can't use any aircraft in Mountainous terrain so that's one downside as well. Trading complete base security for shorter trade trips, I might prefer a truck to be honest.

Nevermind I just didn't know how to use Aircraft until now lmao