Current build and artillery

But we're talking small planet, if they have time to build their first t2 arty in fireing range and then an umbrella too either they seriously out eco-ed you, it's late game and their eco can support this or you are painfully unaware of your enemies movements (a bad player)

Btw it's not true that a laser platform would need the same amout of time as t2 arty.
You'll have T2 arty around the time their orbital is finished, but they still didn't build the platform yet, which is very expensive.

So I wouldn't see it as a "direct counter" as it is now.

Just assumed to be honest didn't really consider build cost differences

I actually think the problem may be missile launchers. In TA, as I recall, the missile launchers were pretty terrible against ground units. They'd shoot at them but they were mainly good for killing planes. For ground units you needed lasers. This made T1 turtling tricky because you didn't want lasers against a T1 bomber rush and you didn't want missiles against a T1 ground rush.

T1 arty was also woefully inaccurate.

If someone was trying to "tower rush", you could fight them pretty well by throwing units at them. They really needed some units to screen their towers. In PA I don't feel like that's the case at all -- a few missile launchers, a few wall segments, your first pelter and you can pretty well massacre T1 units. Then it turns into a game of tower rush vs tower rush.

Maybe if missile launchers were weaker against ground units, we could at least put some fear into the tower rusher that he has to cover all the bases with missiles AND lasers or else risk a rush by the type of unit he's weakest against.

As it is, I almost never build lasers. Missiles are good enough and they handle air as well. (I always liked the old TA "Spike" concept...3 missile towers and 1 laser tower with dragon's teeth in front of them. For PA I just do 4 missile towers. It makes early turtling on small worlds so much easier.)

Well it's difficult to balance because Uber's said they want you to balk and take large amounts of losses when you see/charge a defensive line. They want defenses to be scary.

But the way the economy is in PA right now unless you go into the super late game you simply cannot cover your entire base fast enough with defenses to not have a weak spot.

And if your enemy finds that weak spot you're screwed. =p

I don't think I've seen a single game where T2 artillery was used, it's always nukes. Hell, I was coming to the forum to talk about how T2 artillery might need improving

I love this game, because artillery is scary.
Every time I see a Holkins blast a big hole into a blop of units, I watch it joyfully.
So it should stay scary. But I think ground units need a bit of a buff, or just new units that can handle arty fire better than the current ones (thinking about big bulky megabots to which arty fire would be nothing more than a tickle).

There's defenses against nukes though (which, as per some other thread, needs improvement, but at least there IS a defense).

There's no defense against artillery except to blow the thing up. Against opponents that are good at building up their defenses, I find artillery to be pretty useful.

I do think it is lame that there is no defensive answer to artillery.
Your only option is to either abandon anything in range of the artillery or destroy it.
And destroying it isn't always an option depending on how well protected it is.

The defensive answer to artillery is surely the same as the defensive answer to nukes: nukes.

For a thought experiment... you've a big economy, you've pumped out many more factories than your opposing team... yet you are on a small planet and they get T2 artillery up first. You lose everything within a few minutes and can build nothing new. Why should any unit be that powerful that early?

I do feel like the power economy of defences and artillery really needs to be amped up.

So that players need a large power economy to support such powerful static weapons.

That's a constructive idea.

That may be the best idea. Presently the Catapult and Holkins use up 500 energy per second to fire full speed (if the wiki is up to date, anyway). So you need a single T1 energy plant to power them. That's hardly even worth the trouble of making them cost energy to shoot.

What if they used 5000 energy per second?

I agree with the power cost.
You could always turn them off and on depending on what you want to power too.

Incidentally, I think power requirements for firing may be broken. Last night we had a game where everything was destroyed except for this "Maginot line" of pelters and missile turrets. According to the wiki, pelters require energy to fire so, as per TA, they should have literally just sat there and done nothing until the team could save up 1000 energy for a shot.

Instead, the whole line fired full speed.

So maybe a big part of the problem right now is that energy stuff just isn't working entirely correctly. In PA it's generally acceptable to run at 0 energy and feed things as power comes in. In TA that would quickly result in your death because any weapon that needed energy to shoot (which included some units) would not be able to fire until your energy pool had the amount that it needed to pull the trigger. You always had to keep your energy pool up and hitting 0 was a big problem.

I've also noticed you can't turn things off (like radar). There's a button for it but it doesn't work.

Maybe artillery balance will be a lot better once they get that stuff fixed up.

I'm with you on this one - it seems like a piece of the puzzle which slots in perfectly. Among other things, having the potential - however slim or difficult - to overwhelm an enemy's energy capacity by swarming their turrets is appealing as a countermeasure to defenses.

Big Berther/Intimidator from TA was 10k energy pershot. Buzzsaw and the Vulcan versions where astronomical in there energy costs to shoot. I think it took 4 or 5 fusion reactors to shoot a buzzsaw continuously. Correct me if im wrong

I think it would be great if they'd implement this in PA.