Catapult/Holkins Range

Moving this to the Balance discussion forum ->

Fix to Missiles manuliey target like the ones in supcom

I stated initially that this statistic occurred "In a weird way," and later that it assumes the units are stationary (or at least remaining in range for the same time), so it seems odd to bring up speed at this point. For me, this is purely about what the catapult can do over a given time.

I'm actually using it as an "anti-absolute", to disprove the notion that overkill necessarily makes a catapult more efficient against vanguards than other units. And, since the slammer is the cheapest and fastest T2 ground unit, it implies that other units would make even better targets than the vanguard or slammer, which is funny. That piqued my interest, since I expected the slammer to be a terribly inefficient target for the catapult.

Now now, let's not buff Sorian's AI any more than we absolutely have to!

I brought it up because this is a horrible assumption. You don't just sit a group of bots still inside the range of a catapult, you move them in to destroy things. You should be considering speed, otherwise your argument is only valid for an unrealistic set of circumstances, and when you do consider speed, it's clear that the catapult is less effective against slammers than vanguards.

And when your analysis starts with a lone, undefended catapult in an open field, how much more realistic has it become? Even if you set up or analyze scenarios in a real game, when will it match what a player is facing at a particular time? Almost never. Which is why I stopped doing it...

Why is damage per second such a popular stat? On its own, it's completely useless, but it's so simple and intuitive that players can apply its significance (or insignificance) to every situation they encounter. That's what I'm looking for: Simple statistics that are incomplete but can be readily applied in-game. If you assume the units are stationary, what you are actually doing is leaving time as an unknown variable. You don't need to know if the catapult is in an open field or surrounded by walls or deep within a base, because the player does. You just let the player decide how much of a factor time will be. It means I get to do less math and the player gets better theorycrafting.

(Though, I do miss the spreadsheets.)

Catapults have variable dps because of overkill and it only has one missile in the air at one time and distance for the missile to travel varies.

how would it be a buff? if i remember right the missiles in supcom built slowly and did not have homeing and did blast damage when it hit a unit (he he..i used them for defence a lot )

So that's why its firing rate is listed as 1 second. I just assumed it was wrong, since the flight time was usually around 10 seconds. Good to know!

You're close, but not quite

The catapult has a listed firing rate of 1 per second; however it takes energy to fire - 20,000 energy, in fact. While charging, it uses 2,000 energy - taking 10 seconds to charge up enough for 1 shot. The lifetime of a missile is 15 seconds so in theory it could have 2 in the air, but since it only takes 6.25 seconds to travel in a straight line to it's max range, it's not likely to be possible to do it (you can extend it past it's max range by moving the unit it's targeting away from the launcher, but even using a skitter I think it falls just short of 10 seconds).