PA is a "Spam Fest?" Oh please...

Projectiles are pretty much universally faster than their TA counterparts, except for the artillery. The Bertha was unmatched in terms of speed, and she's not really represented in PA at all.

Hopefully such a grievous oversight will be rectified.

Well bertha = lobber i guess

Dont confuse .
There are too many metal , until the metal spot placement is finally reworked we will have plenty,its perfectly normal like cola-colin say.
Begin to think about what the game will have, not what we have now, is still in the development stage.

For now we only have the option make large armies, logical that on final product ,the options will be many.
Spam are a part of this crazy game that we love so much, whether by land sea or air, asteroids being launched, armies falling from the sky from another planet or nukes, or another of the many options we will have.
The craziness of this game from the brilliant minds of PA ,is what they want to give to us.
Total madness armies ,with unprecedented options ,not found in any other game.
I do not see time to have access to all of these options.

Lobber != Bertha.

Bertha:
-Overpowered as all **** considering its price
-But still balanced because when it blew up it took half your base with it
-Long range
-High damage
-Large blast radius
-Extreme inaccuracy
-Fast projectile speed
-THUNDERS like a constipated god

Lobber:
-Balanced
-Relatively short range
-Next to no AoE, unless shooting at armies
-High damage
-High price
-Almost pin-point accuracy

I know it's still alpha, but I had to point out that fallacy. EVERYONE loved the Bertha, and if PA doesn't at least reference the thing I will be a little sad.

The lobber is a bit more like the shore defense cannons from TA. Lower the DEEPS and pump up the health, and you would hardly know the difference between them.

Are you for real? Much of the bertha's damage came from causing an enemy base to chain react (along with TA's inefficient repairs and weak pathing). Its actual damage output was quite awful and the weapon itself was fairly trivial to snipe.

But yeah, that death explosion sucked. It's a shame Supcom missed out on that. High explosive units practically counter themselves.

You would like the Yotha(Or something like that) then from SupCom:FA In case you don't know, upon its death it releases a energy storm that damages anything it hits for 1k damage, and it keeps doing that for like 30 seconds. I have seen many a commander die to the storm, both friendly and enemy. As well as it killing other experimentals.

I think main issue is the metal spot placing. It is nearly equally distributed on the planet's surface.
I would prefer if the automated placement would produce a result like a supreme commander standard map.

Some spots in direct proximitiy to the spawning points
Some spots on choke points or at least clustered together to make it worth fighting for this area
Some single spots.

What Mushoomars means is that she was 'too cheap' for what she could do.

A Basic Guardian or Punisher was ~2000 metal; a Bertha or Intimidator was only double that at ~4000.
Considering the massive disparity in range and damage potential, you would have thought the Bertha would need to cost more, but she didn't... because she was severely limited due to her low pitch - high velocity shots.

She was a specialised piece of Advanced equipment that behaved completely differently to her Basic counterpart.

Not so for the Lobber and the Pelter, where one is just the upgraded version of the other.

---

In other news; The reason it is difficult to effectively deal with SPAM in PA is because PA lacks the awesomeness that was the Guardian and the Punisher.

And no, the Pelter != the Guardian or Punisher. Make the Pelter fire about three times as fast (about once a second) and increase the AOE size by about double (but drop the damage down a little bit), and you might have something resembling the Guardian or Punisher.

No fixed metal spots have one advantage: you cannot have a robot copy paste BO. You need to adapt for a minimum. I like this idea. As long as each spawn have equal ressources.

Oh yes please. I just loved guardians and Punishers so much.

Not entirely true. The bertha also had a very high energy demand, equal to about 1/5 of fusion (costing 1100 metal) or 11'ish solar power (1500 metal). 5K doesn't seem like much metal, but having 2 high explosives inside your base is always asking for trouble.

Perhaps the bertha was a little strong, but don't forget that berthas were basically game ender territory for TA. They could breach an impenetrable defense when standard units no longer worked. That role that is replaced by asteroids and maybe some sats in PA.

Even if the TA stats were copied verbatim, the Guardian/punisher would be much weaker simply because units path so much better in PA. A huge amount of the ranged weapon's power was due to units bumbling around like idiots, stalling their movement and making an approach impossible. It's not unreasonable to expect 80 peewees to absolutely destroy 2 guardian cannons, which wasn't necessarily true in TA.

You have to be careful about AoE. TA used a linear damage falloff for its area weapons. If math serves me correctly, this reduced the lethality(area damage potential) of all splash damage by about 2/3. Having flat area damage literally makes artillery 3 times as good, which is an absolutely game breaking difference if ignored.

The difference is probably even stronger than that, because very few splash weapons in TA ever scored direct hits. Most blows were glancing attacks, dealing somewhere between partial and nil.

I completely agree that AOE shouldn't be just straight damage over an area; the centre should have full damage and then have a reduced effect towards the edge of the explosion. Am I to assume that PA isn't using a linear falloff on their AOE then?

It's something you'll have to test out yourself.

Way back when, I think Neutrino said something about damage falloff working very poorly because of the networking model in Supcom. So Supcom used flat damage instead. PA uses a dedicated server, so AoE should be much easier to model this time around.

Well Nukes don't use a falloff system (or at least, it is not currently apparent), so I highly doubt that the Lobber is. Hopefully that will be changed.

We are not using damage falloff yet. It is something we hope to add in, however. It's a very useful tuning tool to be able to use.

Damn straight!
Thanks for the pseudo-confirmation-hope on that Garat.