Friendly Fire on Splash Damage

What about implementing Friendly Fire on Splash Damage?

Artillery and Bombers deliver splash damage, and they are not affected by line of sight of any sort. So they do not fire on each other. Well, blobs of bombers do, but they can't hit each other anyway because bombs simply drop dead on the ground.

It seems a bit unreasonable to have such a massive volume of fire affecting only enemy's troops, when in the mix you may have yours as well.

Mixed armies may be a rare occurrence, and friendly fire could complicate defending one's own base. But it would also be more realistic.

What's your opinion in the matter?

Hm...

Well. It'd open up a new level of complexity in the game. For better or worse.

It'd also mean there's a new way to troll teammates.

So... I dunno.

I liked it in TA and missed it in Supcom, etc.

Gameplay-wise, the main interaction it affected was to make rushing up to a bunch of heavy tanks with fast units a bit more effective. The really sharp damage falloff of most weapons in TA made it not have a really big effect in general, though. In PA the vast majority of weapons don't have any splash at all so this wouldn't affect much currently.

Mostly this is a flavor thing, I think, and I think it's terribly silly to see a bunch of t2 bombers blow up an enemy force you're engaged with while your own units shrug off the explosions happening over them, or see your Pelters fire over half your base without any issues. It's even already implemented for deathnukes, nuclear missiles, and planet-smashing. I can't think of a good reason why smaller explosions should be arbitrarily exempt from the WYSIWYG "explosion=damage" principle.

Been wondering about this too. IIRC, all weapons in TA, splash or not, did neutral damage. They hit whatever they hit. Getting someone to blow up his own base with his own artillery was half the fun of a bot rush.

I do think that splash damage, at least, should be neutral (like the nuke). Let it hit whatever it hits.

If friendly fire is a thing, then units would need to have some intelligence to not fire when friendly units could get hit.

Some sort of win/loss analysis.

"Will this shot/bomb do more damage to the enemy or my team?" and fire accordingly.

Yeah, gotta have some friendly fire. That way if you are supporting your close range army with artillery fire you actually have to be careful.

For me this is still kinda early, I'm sure this is the kind of thing that will be experimented with a bit once the core balance has stabilized a bit. As others have said, it could have good or bad outcomes, which one is dependent on a lot of different factors that we can really account for right now.

Barring that, I don't like the idea of "limiting" FF on AOE to only specific unit/weapons types, if AOE is going to do FF, then ALL AOE should be doing it.

Mike

Both Supcom and TA had friendly fire from all splash damage. However, projectiles would ghost through your own units and they would ignore direct fire orders on friendly targets.

TA had splash damage on pretty much everything, even if the AoE was a few pixels big. Your units could be hurt if the ground was attacked directly at their center of mass, but the shot would not directly connect.

Spring introduced the idea of pure LoS shots. Skirmshing bots would block vision from longer range units, making them unable to shoot. It is one of the most powerful ways of shutting down direct fire AA weapons.

friendly fire has got to be ON, baby! a missile is a missile, a nuke a nuke, a bullet a bullet.

being able to raid a base and simultaneously hit it with arty with no consequences is cheap! no way man.

yes please

how so? this is TA and FA in the text.

this isn't even a question. what's the point of simulated projectiles otherwise?

How does it add complexity?

Because it is a new element that must be considered. Players will need to adjust their play style to avoid friendly fire.

When something adds tasks and choices to the game, that adds complexity.

Just because another game has it doesn't mean it isn't complex.

Easy example.

Halo vs Call of Duty/Battlefield/etc.

In Halo players just point and pull the trigger and you're perfectly accurate (with some firearms). In Call of Duty/Battlefield/etc you must aim down the sights in order to have perfect aim. You must perform an additional action in order to accomplish the same task.

That is an additional level of complexity.

Additional complexity doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

It's just an additional element that must be taken into consideration.

I haven't made up my mind on whether I support the change or not.

You understood me wrong. I was saying I see this the other way around. "removing splash"

It's always been there: there's nothing to "add".

Yes by all means if you must "add splash", "add" it, so long as it means you're not removing it.

TA certainly didn't. They fired on enemy units, friendly fire be damned. One way to destroy an enemy fusion plant was to get any awful units you could to just go stand beside it. Their pitiful damage would get augmented by the rain of enemy artillery that would end up destroying their own fusion plant faster than you could.

One interesting effect, I thought, was that it adds another factor into how you select what units to build and how to lay out your base defenses. Things that did big AE were awesome for killing enemy swarms but also dangerous to your own base, so ideally you'd like to screen them with precision weapons like laser turrets.

Similarly, using a bunch of AE tanks to defend your base was about as dangerous as just letting the enemy run amok. You'd prefer precision-fire units for defense.

One of my favorite units in TA (as the Core) was The Can, largely because its weapon was a laser, so sending herds of them didn't cause friendly fire damage. If nothing else, a few of them in among your other units could help snipe enemy units that got into your lines, hopefully before they caused too much friendly-fire damage.

That's kind'a things I would like to have in PA as well.

Those are the very things that should not be in PA.

We have super advanced automated machines of war. They wouldn't be so stupid as to let their defensive structures tear apart their own buildings.

TA wasn't perfect.

Gaming capabilities have improved.

We don't need such a dumb mechanic.

I always thought the lore was "quantity over quality". We have really stupid machines of war that are produced quickly and cheaply. Nothing about any of these games leads me to think we are fighting with super advanced machines of war. (I tend to think of TA and Planetside in the same terms, in that they both appear to use really advanced nanolathe technology to produce units that seem to have basically WW2 levels of sophistication. I imagined that while nanolathes make construction super fast and easy, they can't lathe sophisticated optics or electronics, which is why most units are half blind and work best when manually controlled.)

But more to the point, friendly fire:
* Is intuitive
* Adds depth to the game
* Make unit decisions more interesting and important (want to defend your base primarily with T2 bombers? Good luck!)
* Causes even more, larger explosions

I'd suggest adding friendly-fire for ALL weapons but I dunno how expensive that would be to add. Currently they have a habit of unloading into the backside of my own factory, because it's in the way and they're too stupid to go around.

In TA, you could have Friend Fire w/ every shoot...

I thought you never played TA?
Friendly fire was a great mechanic in this game which conveyed a sense of power on your unit's weaponry.
It felt great, it made sense, it was an interesting mechanic.

It doesn't make sense. Not one bit of sense.

It doesn't make any sense whatsoever that super advanced machines that do nothing but wage war are so stupid that they would destroy their own buildings.

You're right. I've never played TA. For one, no game is perfect. I've read a lot about TA and it's easy to conclude that it isn't perfect. And lots of TA players all agree that it wasn't perfect. If it was a perfect game, then no other RTS would be ever made.