shooting artillery from an astreaus

hi,

I noticed units shoot from an Astreus when in orbit.
Most units don't have the range to reach the ground / air layer (e.g. not possible to shoot planes with a Spinner).
However, if you load up artillery (Sheller) you can harass the enemy ground units / buildings without going for SSX (expensive), furthermore this solution has superior range and is mobile.
I am not sure on this, but this combo may outreach Umbrella range (only played against AI who did not have Umbrellas up), which seems overpowerd.
Do you believe this was intended? Anyone experimented with it?

Intended?!?!? Lol no.

But this is a cool find.

Fill 200 aestria with sniper bots, there's your seige orbital unit.

It's a known bug. I and others reported it last build after a new player stumbeled over it. We got replays and all linked in the last build thread.

Interesting. I'd almost go so far as to vote for this not being classed as a bug - having orbital-to-ground mobile artillery seems like a brilliant planet-cracker.

Similarly, last night I played a game where my opponent didn't really have a lot of orbital defenses, but did put up a few Umbrellas. I set up a few orbital factories on his planet to gain control, and noticed that the Umbrellas weren't shooting my factories, but were actually shooting the units *out* of my factories before they were even built. Effectively, they were preventing the orbital factories from making anything at all.

Is *that* intended, or is the rock I've been living under larger than I thought?

It's fun to see it when you load up the lander's with vanguards. If you have enough, you can make an UBER BEAM!

If it's a bug, it should not be fixed, because it's awesome.

After further thought I like the "feature" as it adds variety to the tactics. Currently it does not work for all units though, which seems a bit strange. Why do spinner rockets shooting downward have so little range? I would love to have mobile anti-air capabilities from orbit.

If the feature were to be kept it would need a counter because currently there is little you can do against it when your opponent has control of the orbital layer, e.g. a t2 anti orbital tank / bot.

PA#4076

Stahp you, we want to keep this bug

it's not totally clear but the high and steep trajectories are a good indication that they're firing.

cheers

That sounds amazing, and should stay. That's such a great emergent tactic

Well... infernos do it too. Game over in 2 seconds.
PA#4215

Cool pic though.

If this were to be kept at all, it should really only be artillery/tac. missiles if anything. Infernoes and Vanguards sniping from orbit is just plain bad.

My word, is this bug still around? It's not particularly useful; the accuracy is so poor that that most units can't hit anything and even the few that can don't hit reliably.

Okay, let's be reasonable. This is probably counter-vanilla-intuitive.

However, this has potential for amazing gameplay. If the right people nutted up to this idea, it could work as follows:

1) It would need to be more wysiwyg. Anything able to fire from orbit, tac missiles and snipers and even shellers if you like, needs pretty clear trails so you can clearly tell there is a projectile coming from space hitting you. The units capable of this need to have mention of it in their description.

2) There would need to be more orbital interaction. All tactical missiles being able to target orbitals would be a start, and would give bluehawk and catapult the ability to shoot orbitals. I would accept the fact although not relish it, that hornets would also. Hey, technically they do need a facility. Meh.

3) This would actually expand on orbital units being very 2d. It would make it an interactive layer without arguably making it a clone (it uses select other layer's units which limits it against the other layers, and mainly uses it in tandem with actually deploying the units)

4) It would also be nice, for the orbital factories to expand on this, and be able to build pre-loaded astraeuses with these units, if that is in any way possible. Invading from gas giants actually makes them fit into the game.

Infernos is a different thing...

The artillery did at least respect the weapon range, despite firing from orbit. The beam type weapon of the Inferno just glitched entirely, the commander on the ground should never have been in the damage volume of the flames.

Can please someone test how Infernos behave when they fire at units while on one of the bridges on metal planets? Do they also hit units under the bridge simultaneously?

yea i thought this was just a bug with my mod from increasing transport capacity of astreus. But no looks like it's a vanilla bug too.

*edit*
I just tried to do this in vanilla, but it doesnt work? I'm kinda confused now.