In a game I recently played, I found the advanced artillery to be insanely overpowered. On the smaller planets, it has range over the vast majority of the planet and can one-shot most units, including advanced factories. It could even one-shot other advanced artillery stations! I know there weren't any shields in the original TA, but the levels were rarely flat and for the most part it could not accurately hit its mark. Here it seems to always hit and do splash damage to the point where it can level a base in seconds flat. The game seems to be a contest as to who can build this station the fastest and dominate the other commanders. Has anyone found a way around this?
I actually don't mind this because its a great way to counter turtling. Best way is to keep expanding and gain map control and harassing enemy bases with small but strategically placed troops to do the most damage. If mobile artillery is killing you and you're worried about it, you didn't set up multiple bases and spread out. The other things it to use fast moving bots to take them out as they can generally dodge the shots.
Trouble here of course an accomplished turtle player will have one of these up in 5 minutes, with other assorted myriad defenses, walls, turrets, etc. This makes the base near impenetrable unless your eco is massively superior. That said it's generally not difficult exceeding their eco in the normal order of things as 'Turtlers' Generally confine themselves to a fairly small area, leaving the rest to you. This is fine during a 1v1, but in a FFA means you may lose without ever seeing your opponent, especially if you start really close to the bastards. It's infuriating and demoralising being base-walked to death and I personally hate it with a passion. The key to beating this as with any other strategy is intel. Of course it's easier said than done and may be severely challenging. Years of playing other RTS where the enemy generally only comes at you from one general direction have spoiled me, good intel conferred a marginal advantage beyond the confines of your base and was generally very low in the order of priorities. PA needs a much more active hand in intelligence gathering.
Turtling, no matter how powerful should be no problem as long as siege weapons and assault units are better. Better mobile artillery with a 'shoot and scoot' skirmishing mode, along with effective armour units that can tank enemy weapons could easily tip the mid-late game balance of defences. Now I like this idea, as it gives players a way of fortifying bases against rushing assaults, that will keep the amount you need to monitor bases on other planets down to a minimum, but with appropriate advanced artillery units and heavy tanks still leaving the resource heavy late game with the option to push these bases over. It all about giving the players the tools for the job.
As a turtle player I have found these to be only decent for base defense, as they dont hit units very well, and almost never if they are moving, making them 100% useless Vs Air and 90% useless vs Bots I do like sneaking over to an area just outside of there base and plopping down two of them heh
Thats what we're talking about when we're discussing overpowered or not. Artillery is meant to his stationary units, such as any building. They are mainly offensive for taking down defenses. Turtling with them sucks because the enemy base will probably not be near you. Unless the enemy is creeping on you with turrets or artillery. Also stop turtling, gain map control and take offensive, gain map control, creep on enemy bases. You will win alot more than puting your resources just toward defenses.
I dont do full turtle, but I like about 2 of the long range artys and an advanced radar in my main base to keep creepers at bay.... i do expand but i dont build to many other bases, I like to get a few groups of T1 Air builders and spread them out, spaming T1 MEX everywhere, maybe plop down an AA and a Laser Tower ever so often here and there I have found that I dont go orbital fast enough though, that is something I need to work towards
Except in edge cases like very small maps, the artillery seems approximately alright. Obviously cost, range, and other things will get tweaked, but it's in the ballpark of reasonable for precision artillery. It could probably do with having its cost reduced and making shots cost resources, such as a gradual drain to build the next shell. I would like to see cheap artillery with similar range, but which is very inaccurate. Especially cheap mobile artillery with fantastic range that you have to position carefully behind your lines, and direct against clustered forces or defensive emplacements. And we also need artillery with some real splash damage to it.
Although I have no idea if Artillery is over powered because I don't know the game well enough; to all the people saying artillery is meant to counter turtling. Surely if the turtle-er(?) has set up Artillery it will destroy yours before you can build it.
Available to both sides. Hey! Don't ruin this discussion with your pointing out obvious holes in our logic.
Its hardly turtling if you use a army instead of turrets. In that case you can just use your own army, because you don't have much sieging to do.
I think that the Arty isn't Overpowered there some ways to kill that thing 1- scoult, if you see the enemy building one, make an strike force and kill it 2- if you don't scoult but see after it was finished, make some T-2 bombers and kill it
