Friendly Fire on Splash Damage

Tatsujb
As i stated before PA is not TA replica they are in compleatly diferent scenarios with compleatly diferent units
also telling people to go play starcraft seens to me that you have no argument and that´s your last resort
We need to thing diferent from TA if not we are not making the next gen RTS we are making the next gen RTS TA clone
Just because it worked on TA dosent mean it will work on PA
As always
A good day to you sir

EDIT: I compleatly understand that you dont want to see in this game but there are some aspect of PA that i wouldnt like to see in the game either soo we are on the same boat

TA is not a perfect game.

Just because TA did something doesn't mean we can't make it better now that computing power has increased.

"TA did this" is not a logically sound argument. It is in fact a logical fallacy.

You must back up your claims with why they are good.

And since we're arguing a specific target, you must explain why machines of war would be so stupid that they would cause more harm to their team than good.

I think a better comparison for this discussion would be Supreme Commander (or Forged Alliance) vs. Supreme Commander 2. In the original game, all AOE attacks caused friendly fire splash, and I never saw anyone lose a game because their own artillery wiped out a base. It's important to note that the artillery in SupCom was very inaccurate as well, often with splash damage far outmatching anything in PA. But if you used artillery to shell an enemy base while your own ground troops were moving in, you would incur unnecessary loses on your own troops. If an enemy was in your base, the minimum fire range on the largest cannons prevented them from causing friendly fire damage, while the smaller artillery didn't have the large splash damage that would be worrying. If someone got into your base (via transports. marching, or teleporting), they did so with powerful units that were gonna wreck havoc friendly fire or not. Again friendly fire was never really a deciding factor, and this is in a game where power plants and metal makers would go boom and set off massive chain reactions if your base was too compact.

Compare this to SupCom2 where there is no friendly fire. People use withering artillery fire and can target it directly into their own armies and bases with no consequences. In fact, that's the way I saw people deal with most attacks (that and unstoppable blobs of shielded gunships). I see that as a far worse situation.

Some people have suggested a middle ground between these two, where friendly fire exists, but units actively avoid firing when it would be possible, but I think that would be very frustrating. The only units that really need to be concerned with friendly fire that we have in the game are arty and bombers. I want my artillery to be firing at distant targets, lasers are for close up work, so I think a minimum fire range is a better solution for that issue. If I drive my ground troops into an area that I'm actively shelling, it's not much different than if I drive my army too close to a nuke that I launch. And bombers seem like a bad unit to use to defend a power plant field. Use gunships for that if you want fast, accurate first responders, don't set bombers to mindlessly carpet bomb every dox that enters your base.

Thats the problem in PA there are more ways to enter an enemy unit than just marching we could use unit cannons, aestraeus anything and thats with artilhery friendly fire worry me it only takes one units to level your entire base with your own artilhery

On the contrary, it encourages aggressiveness and fighting in the field. Friendly fire is anti-turtle. You don't want enemies banging on your wall, where your own Holkins may end up destroying a wall section. You want your guys banging on his wall so that his Holkins can destroy his wall.

Friendly fire rewards aggressiveness.
"Smart" defenses reward turtling.
Smart defenses that make big explosions that magically do not hurt your own units encourages sloppy turtling where you just lob high damage shells into your own base as a matter of course because why not.

At the same time it discourage using artilhery then because why would i built it then if all they can do is destroy my base then there is no point in building artilhery whatsoever

And that is a very good point. Just look at Seton's Clutch.

Choke points were very common in SupCom.

You generally always knew which direction your enemy was coming from.

In PA, it'd be easy to flank around and come in on the back side and then be inside the backside firing range of your artillery.

Ok lets be logical about this.

Almost everyone here Agrees there should be Friendly Fire.
The discussion is now "Should your units every accidentally shoot each other, or will they be such perfect shots that friendly fire will never become an issue?"

If I build a pelter, and it is attacking an enemy base, then I run all my army into their base and the pelter hits my own army. Is that the pelter's fault? No, its my fault for running my army into my own bullets.

If a few units run into my base, and my own pelter attacks them and destroys my own base. THAT is where I find the problem to be.

I have a simple solution.
Make Pelters have a Firing Arc. (They only shoot in a pre-determined direction). OR make it so you can limit your Pelter to only fire a certain direction.

That way, it will never fire into your own base (Only away from it)

The range of pelters, sure. But working with the current balance, pelters are pretty accurate and have low splash, so I'd be ok with them firing into my base to help defend. I'd rather have them do that than idle beacause they might take a little health off a bot factory, that instead is being murdered by a small group of dox. The Holkins is another matter though. However, it's slow to fire and slow to turn, so if any enemy force is in my base long enough for me to be concerned about friendly fire from Holkins, I'm already in serious trouble, and I probably want the Holkins to help clear the enemies out as best it can. But being a much bigger gun with a much better range, I would also expect it to have a much larger minimum firing distance, again making friendly fire base wrecking a minimal concern.

The only unit where I can see FF being any true concern are the bombers. But many people feel T2 bombers are already pretty OP. If you had to worry about your close air-support carpet bombing runs wiping out your own troops that are mixed in with the enemy, you might choose a different tool, like a gunship. I don't feel like such powerful AOE units should be able to operate so close to friendlies without consequences, but if I tell my bombers to rain hell and screw the collateral damage, they better do it.

Uber arealdy confirmed that artilhery is too accurate and they are fixing it wich leave us with that
Yeah if one guy pass trought your defences then be ready buddy because your automated artilhery system will make sure that your base will ceased to exist

Yupp. All it takes is one.

And then there's the unit cannon...

I think you guys are really overestimating the destructive capability of artillery, friendly fire or no. They can't even level an enemy base that fast so I really think your doomsday predictions are overblown. Of course, everything in this thread is pretty hypothetical, and without trying things out in game with different settings, I don't think that this discussion can really be resolved one way or the other.

yea but there's a REASON total annihilation came up with this.

It is somewhat of an exaggeration.

The Holkins... does crazy damage. Destroys many buildings with two shots.

And Hornets... Those really are base leveling damage.

Are you going to explain the reason or continue to use a logical fallacy?

What's more, there's many things TA didn't do due to technical limitations. We have better hardware and can do more now.

I did : It's interesting it's fun, it's the opposite of random rules. It's immersion it's logical, I'm a logical person. artillery must functions by a guestimation seeing as it's shots take long to land, if an ally tank rolls under at just the wrong time when it lands ... wait.. why do we have simulated projectiles again??? /sarcasm

I rarely use walls, but I've to admit that for once walls protect what's behind, let's say a Laser Turret, so that it can shot down more units before being overwhelmed. Therefore walls help in keeping enemy foes out of the door.

I'm not against friendly fire.


I'm against stupidity.

As i´m as well artilhery is very powerful it can truly destroy buildings quickly now combine that with a catapult and the ability to cause damage to your own units now you´ve created a gun powder barrel add a single scout sent by Unit cannon, austraeus, transporter etc and booom your base is gone

You must not bother reading anything I wrote.

I am not arguing against simulated projectiles or friendly fire.

I'm simply saying that units should make an intelligent choice to fire. "Will I do more damage to my friends or my opponents?"

It is not logical that units would cause more damage to their own team.

I feel we are missing the point somehow.

All rules in game apply to all players. So what so ever will be decided, it can be used at one's detriment or advantage.

What it is essential is to keep rules at a minimal complexity, because that will allow players a better understanding of the consequences of their actions and design. The Artillery could do massive damage or none at all, it wouldn't change the outcome of a game. Smarter players will ultimately win over the less smart with any given rules.

It is also very important to keep the game modest in requests over the CPU. So the simplest the algorithm, the smoother the game.

It would be nice to have Friendly fire on Splash damage. Is it simple to implement? Damn yes. Would it change the game play? Likely so. It has to be tested, but it seems like a fair addition.

On the other hand I agree that hypotetically it would be great to have an AI smart enough to discern within options and results of any action of every single unit. But is it simple to implement? Hell no. Worse, it would likely affect negatively the game play due to poor performance. Plus a big investment for developing it.

I think it is quite simple.