Fire arc limiting

This is just another minor thing that I hope the devs can think about and maybe do something with. Games of this scale often feature giant gun emplacements with very low turn speeds. And those are really cool.

Unfortunately, they generally operate on the same AI as smaller scale weapons though, and one of the downsides of this, is that they seem to not really take into account that if they have to shoot at something behind them it would take them some 20 seconds to spin around and back again.

Would it be possible to include an option for heavy gun emplacements to set their allowed firing arc from the UI? These are usually things you don't have hundreds of, so a little bit of micro might be very helpful to ensure these very expensive weapons stay on target.

Basically just the option to select 2 points that create a cone in which the gun selects targets, while ignoring any target outside of that area. And, ideally, weapons taking into account how long it will take to adjust their own when selecting targets (if they don't do so already)

It's really frustrating when you have a Big Bertha as base defense and when your opponents army starts moving you realise that it's aiming entirely in the wrong direction because it was trying to shoot down a scout plane and it takes 10-15 seconds to rotate it back at which point the enemy is already way too close to shoot at.

Also this feature can be as easy as clicking two points on the ground and projecting lines from the gun through them to visualise exactly where it's allowed to shoot and where it isn't.

Starcraft 2 does this. It has a feature called "target priority", and one of the options is "firing arc".

yea but the question is, does PA do this?

Turrets in SupCom would aim at enemies before they enter their range. After an enemy has been killed the turret typically chooses a target that is next to the dead enemy.
This could take you pretty far without having to set a fire arc.
As for long range plasma turrets targeting planes on their own... Meh... Don't know.

Depends if unit targeting will work like in TA or like most RTS games with a segregation of anti ground and aa fire.

Or just have the turret AI prioritize high-value things that are also relatively close to what it's currently firing at, and avoid firing at fast moving units if there's stationary objects in range.

The more power of control for the user the better, so this is a Yes from me, but I would also recommend to implement some enhancement in targeting AI.


Another ting on that note: In SupCom it always pissed me off that I could not adjust the direction my turrets were pointing manually (especially t2 stationary arties) but by telling them to ground fire some point, so that they turned tp fire that spot. Hence I would like to be able to tell turrets (several at once of course) where to point towards.

get real sick real quick of artillery shooting into my base and scoring friendly fire I however propose a different solution:

The Attackbox or Killbox. artillery and aircraft can be set to attacking only targets within the attack box, effectively allowing you to tailor area denial with these. for an aircraft it is like a patrol except instead of going around the edges it focuses on everything inside. the attackbox for artillery can also be set up specially for a greater range, in essence the artillery can shoot up to twice its normal range into an attack box but will not be able to aim properly at anything outside of its normal range, a large scatter range will prove it to be more inefficient at singling out targets and just saturation, kinda like artillery in SupCom2 but poosibly even more inaccurate if that is possible (SC is used to both Starcraft and Supcom what a pain)

This reminds me of Company of Heroes where you have to manually rotate gun emplacements. They all have about a 60 degree fire arc. I always thought it was the coolest thing in the world and wished other games would use that.

PA is probably too large a scale for that sort of thing, but it would work for the really big stuff (like annihilators and big berthas).

Golanx' suggestion also sounds good.

The problem with most of the others is that in any situation where there is only one target for your artillery, priority doesn't matter and it will turn towards that target. So that wouldn't entirely stop it. Especially since your opponent could send a single unit into range to taunt the cannon into spinning around before his attack and you wouldn't be able to stop it except by force-firing the cannon somewhere else. Which sounds like busywork and AI abuse and that should be avoided.

What about my suggestion about doing it like CoH? That doesn't have that problem.

That would work, it's pretty close to my original idea but perhaps even easier on the UI as you can just give a move order to an artillery position to fix it's firing arc somewhere.

[imo]That leads to more micro. It should be handled by turret AI. IF AI would be proven incapable of correctly prioritizing targets and it would be impossible to fix that, THAN we can go with hacks solving that problem via additional micro. Not other way around.[/imo]

It is more micro, but it's micro of uber units that you will probably want to micro anyway. After you build a big bertha or mavor you don't exactly just let it sit there and shoot what it wants to typically.

It's also micro that could potentially save you a lot of frustration. I.E. you see your massive defensive military laser which takes forever to turn its turret happens to be facing the wrong direction when an invasion force comes.

It could also save you a lot of micro. For example, you want this artillery to bombard in some general direction but aren't too particular what it shoots. Instead of telling it to attack random blips on the radar or using a complicated area-bombard command, you just give it a move command towards the target and let it go.

Remember, this suggestion is only for the big super weapons, not your every day LLT.

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Also, pluisjen, it occurs to me that there could be a way to adjust the width of the allowed firing arc. Clicking and holding while giving the rotate command would be the simplest way to do this I think.

I really like the idea someone(forget who, sorry) said earlier and just using a "move" command(basically just right-clicking somewhere) to set it's 'default' orientation.

Mike

It could be that with long ranged artillery and a spherical map that having no firing arc could actually be more useful.

Than maybe it's better to be able to set "invasion expected from here" marker on map? So all your forces' AI may benefit from that. You may also set up few markers so some turrets are pointed at one direction and others at other. Your units on patrol and units located at base may also benefit from this markers. If you can't make fully automatic AI you should consider making semi-automatic AI (via human supplied hints) before falling back to fully manual solution, imo.

Actually that makes it more important to have a limiter. With your enemy technically in every direction you probably want to be selective about the angle you're bombarding from.

I don't get why there are so many people who just want to automate as much as possible. I understand wanting to streamline things but at a certain point if you take away too much of the chaos and frantic mouse clicking the game stops being fun. What you're asking for is to be the backseat driver to an AI instead of taking the driver's seat yourself. That's not even an RTS anymore.

Besides, in this situation we do have a semi-automatic AI (the gun keeps shooting and finding new targets without being told to each time) guided via human-supplied hints (the direction of fire is guided by the human in the form of fire arc limiting).

That's actually more of an RTS. The less you focus on trivial orders and the more you focus on grand strategic gestures, the more the "Strategy" part comes out.

I actually think that markers as suggested could work really well, but they'd need to implemented on a deeper level (almost as a default control mechanic) and not something tacked on that only a handful of units know how to use. I actually posted about it before.

In fact, you can enjoy the chaos more if you can sit back and watch your units execute a well prepared plan without having to babysit them all the time because they can't even figure out the simplest orders.