Laser turrets are too cheap/T1 land armies have vanished

while you guys are talkin about bubble shields, I want that aeon spider robot that has its own personal shield (its not a bubble shield) and shoots a lazer at you that was soo cool Surely PA could have a few units with there own personal sheilds right?

It happened to me few times, guy spawned next to me on FFA map and just kept quickly building turrets towards my base... also I stopped couple blobs (i.e. awful a lot) of units in the last moment by nearly instant construction of set of few turrets.

Pretty much it's possible to get powerful build potential early and just expand everywhere with towers and AA's as nearly nothing from T1 can hurt them.

So i am dipping into pa again aftr approximately two month of abscence. I played on amplus against a queller AI to try some ideas. I was going bot rush and my main base got horribly murdered by orcas. which however did not matter in any way, cause i just had my commander moved in before to construct a proxy teleporter south of my opponents base. seeing my base beeing leveled i decided to go all in with my com an moved him onto the plateau south of his base placed my teleporter brought my remaining dox and engis in and startet building laser turrets and walls. i did not believe my eyes when i saw what happend. me without any form of base or eco away from some far expansions left, slowly grinding away on his base. having a double wall in fornt of a turret makes it save from commanders. i then construted ONE factory producing infernos to end the farce. i would love to link the replay but i played on local server due to better responsivness.
So while some say t1 turrets shut down t1 rush. i think t1 turrets ARE the new t1 rush. which is kind of odd.
for sure a human opponent would have handled this situation way better i assume, but what to do against a bunch of walled up t1 turrets that stand in front of your own land factories. they instanously kill whatever gets produced. and are easiely backed up early game by the commanders own aa capability.
pelter are very much useless against this because they love to slowly grind away on the walls. very very very slowly...

There is definetly a need for a very squishy and slow t1 siege unit that outranges turrets by a bit. make it not able to fire while moving to lower its usefullnes in field battle. make it have a minimum range to lower its effectivness against bots. make it be squishy to make it vulnerable to bomber fire. this would not ony solve some problems with the t1 turrets but spice up t1 micro by a great deal. and give some units like dox and t1 bombers more things to be good at.
edit: sry for the typos its quite early in the morning here.

Why did this necro happen exactly? This is a year old thread.

Option A: I am a necromancer still practicing on old threads before tackling the real thing.
Option B: What i described above.

I don't play AI games, so I can't really comment on those, but I find against people, turrets are a minor inconvenience at most. The only time they might cause issues is extremely early in the game against small groups of units, once I get my tank factories going turrets don't stand a chance. Walling them up does help, but realistically, I'm just going to attack from another side, and if you wall yourself off completely, I'll happily take the rest of the planet's metal for myself.

Hitting T2 makes laser turrets laughable. If you go bots, GIL-Es outrange all the laser turrets, if you go tanks, shellers do the same, they are effectivly useless at this point. It doesn't help that the pelter is more or less useless as well.

I think defenses need a total rework. This is what I would do. (whenever I use actual numbers, they are starting guesses and will need tweaking)

SLT,
3/4 the health.
Reduce the range to about 5% more than a dox,
3-4x the turret turn speed,
1/2 the damage (alt 1/3 the damage)
2x the rate of fire (alt 3x the rate of fire)

now we have an anti-dox rush / anti-bomb-bot turret. Huzzah.

DLT
Leave this as is, it's your middle of the road turret, maybe a slight ROF increase

TLT
3 weapons that can independently target
1st weapon (SLT weapon)
2nd weapon (DLT weapon), but with slightly more range than normal DLT (roughly 10%)
3rd weapon - slightly more range than GIL-E, but less than Sheller, high damage slow ROF (maybe 800 damage every 6 seconds?)

To anyone who played TA this should sound familiar, it's effectively the Doomsday machine, the most awesome laser based defensive structure of all time.

Pelter
Drop the high angle arc shots, they look silly and the time to target is way to high. Return to the low angle arcs that they used back in beta. More like field guns / howitzers (longer range), less like mortars (short range)

Good aoe (with damage falloff) right now the aoe is so pitifully low that it will barely hit 2 tanks in a group that is got average spacing)
low damage
medium ROF
same range as sheller (already is this)
Meant to punch holes in blobs of light units / soften blobs of heavy units. Death blobs currently have no real defensive based counter.
Double cost?

Grenadiers serve as your anti laser turret (and they shoot over walls so they are darn good at it) unit at T1 (they already out range DLTs), but since pelters would now be useful at hitting units, you'd have a way at T1 to actually counter a big blob of them. Maybe increase splash radius by 3 (50%) but drop splash damage a bit.

GIL-Es while slightly outranged by the TLT's long range laser, are cheaper and mobile and could easily overwhelm. Shellers outrange TLTs, share range with pelters and are mobile so I don't see any real issue there.

aaand here I am thinking everything needs a total rework.

The thing is, there should be units that more or less make turrets useless. That's what a standing army is for. Maintaining nothing but turrets as your defense should not be an option; turrets should supplement your armies, not replace them.

I disagree, a turret shouldn't be useless due to a specialty unit, but instead that unit just be more cost effective against the turret, and the turret less cost effective against the unit.

Nothing should be invalidated, rock/paper/scissors to the point of invalidation is boring.

On top of that some general thoughts on defense structures:

1. If a turret is at the right position, it should be cost efficient!
   • There are countless options to position a turret WRONG in terms of "it´ll never serve any purpose in the whole game"---and PA gives the attacker very many options to avoid a fight with a turret!
   • There are many options to even render a right placed turret useless---if the enemy is attacking with the right units, that turret doesn´t matter anymore!
   • If you got equal amounts of metal on both sides, the one with the turrets should be OP. Why? Course SOMEHOW he managed to force his enemy to attack on that specific place---and that´s a hard thing!
   • Turrets are stationary. If they are placed at the wrong place, they become literally 100% inefficient!
2. Ballistic defense structures
   • Traditionally, they turn slow, reload slow.
   • Therefore, they need something in exchange. A long range is the traditional answer, but
     • Currently, they reload too slow in comparison to their splash and damage! Would say that Damage should say the same, but reloading times, projectile velocity and splash should increase!
     • They shouldn´t be stupid! You should be able to command a Holkins to only shoot on units in a certain range---ever saw a Holkins shooting at Dox at the end of his range? That´s actually pretty funny...
   • They are cost-inefficient if nothing enters their range, just like turrets. But of course they got a higher range, so basic usability might be better.
   • But still, they lack a lot of flexibility and are countered by enemies who got some room.
   • Therefor, a player have to that roomcut room!

• Anti-All-Units
  • should be weak, but efficient
    • Anchor is quite perfect for that task!

Increasing projectile velocity big times would probably already solve a lot of the issues. Designing large parts of the balance around the idea of units dodging projectiles was probably one of the worst decisions in PA.

The promise of simulated projectiles was that units would be able to block shots by using the terrain and other obstacles. Not units being able to dodge every second weapon type.

It's one thing if you can outrun the turn rate, making a certain long range weapon unable to target mobile units in the first place, but dooming the long range unit to miss because the leading algorithm just can't compensate the ridiculously low velocity is painful.

There's a huge difference in between saying "that unit shouldn't be able to attack that other unit" and saying "that unit is virtually invulnerable against attacks by that other unit". Especially when the target selection algorithm will consider the second case still a "valid target" and can get stuck on it.

Personally I enjoy the projectile dodging, but feel things can go in to fix the issue you speak of. Bots weapons having faster velocity- more pinpoint damage. whilst tanks fire more slow projectiles that deal AOE damage.

It just adds a bit of variety to the game and reminds me of how it was in TA. (Though TA did have minute AOE for practically every weapon)

Thoughts?